On Balance
by JustineR
Summary: In this sequel to Off Balance, Lizzy Bennet and Will Darcy are a New York power couple, married for five years. They work hard and have a great life together. Then they have a baby, and they need to re-negotiate just about everything. Rated M for bad language and gauzy sexual metaphors.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: This story is a sequel to Off Balance, a modern P&P retelling in which Lizzy and Will were both serious overachievers who struggled over gender roles, work, money, and how to deal with family dysfunction. OB1 ended with their marriage, and with promises that one day they would start a family, even though it would be a challenge given their demanding careers. That challenge is the focus of this story. _

___Thanks so very much to my betas, Jan, Barbara, and Alison, for their wonderful feedback and for keeping me honest.  
_

_Blurb__: Lizzy Bennet and Will Darcy are a New York power couple, married for five years. They work hard and have a great life together. Then they have a baby, and they need to re-negotiate just about everything. _

_Rating:__ Rated M for bad language and gauzy sexual metaphors, although it's probably actually safe for 15+. Low angst in the sense that there are absolutely no freak carriage accidents, etc., but you can decide for yourself if juggling work, children, and a relationship counts as a different kind of angst._

* * *

_For Barbara_

* * *

**Prologue**

_The New York Times_

_Weddings/Celebrations_

_July 6, 2008_

_Elizabeth Gardiner Bennet and William Prentiss Darcy IV were married Saturday at the Central Park Boathouse. United States Supreme Court Justice Esther Simkin Goldberg officiated. The bride, 30, and the bridegroom, 34, met through a mutual friend, Charles Bingley, who is married to Ms. Bennet's elder sister, Dr. Jane Bingley. Mr. Bingley and Dr. Bingley served as best man and matron of honor, respectively._

"_I thought he was a big jerk when we first met," said Ms. Bennet when asked about the couple's two-year courtship, "but eventually I realized he was the best of men." Mr. Darcy smiled but had no comment._

_The bride will keep her name. She is senior staff attorney in the immigrant and refugee rights litigation group at Human Rights International. She graduated summa cum laude from Columbia and received a law degree from Yale, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal. She later clerked for Justice Goldberg._

_The bride is a daughter of Thomas and Lillian Bennet of Artemis, N.Y. The bride's father is a professor of English Literature at Artemis College. Her mother is a freelance documentary filmmaker._

_The bridegroom is CEO of WPD Capital. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and also received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School._

_He is the son of the late William Prentiss Darcy III and Anne Fitzwilliam Darcy of Manhattan. The bridegroom's father was founder of WPD Capital. His mother was on the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was the founder of the Fitzwilliam-Darcy Trust._

_The couple will reside in Manhattan._

* * *

**Chapter 1**

**June 2011**

Lizzy came home from work around 7 o'clock on a Friday night. The plan was that she and Will would eat in and then head to a 9 o'clock movie.

Dumping her briefcase and computer on the chair next to the coat closet, she called, "Sweetie, I'm home." She knew Will was home, too, because all the lights were on, as usual. She shoved her coat, shoes, and umbrella into the closet and padded down the long, old Persian carpet gracing the glittering marble hallway.

The hallway looked less like a VIP photo gallery now than it had when they'd first met. Lizzy's family photos were up there with all of Will's Fitzwilliam cousin glamor shots and family portraits. Interspersed were some poster-sized shots Lizzy had taken on their brief but intense vacations, one for each year of their marriage: the Serengeti and Mt. Kilimanjaro, Prague and Paris, Shanghai and Tokyo, Crater Lake and Mt. Rainier. Will always wanted to take cushy First World trips while Lizzy preferred more adventurous ones, so they mixed things up as much as they could. Lizzy hoped they would get to Machu Picchu before too long, but Will was holding out for St. Petersburg. Maybe they would do rock, paper, scissors to decide where they would go next. Or, possibly, they could be more mature about it and agree to take turns or find a compromise like they usually did with big decisions.

"In the kitchen," she heard Will shout as she made her way in that direction.

Will was in his shirtsleeves, grabbing plates and forks out of the kitchen cupboards to set on the table in the breakfast nook. Lizzy could see from the bag he had left on the table that he had stopped at their favorite falafel place on his way home and picked up dinner.

"Hi, babe." She put her arms around him and gave him a kiss, his hands full of utensils and dishes limiting his ability to hug her back. "How was your day?"

He kissed her one more time before turning and heading for the table.

"All right. You?"

She grabbed a couple of glasses and filled them with water from the dispenser on the front of the giant, mostly empty fridge.

"Yeah, good. Just behind-the-scenes stuff today, politicking. Had a meeting with someone from State. Oh, they offered me a job again, can you believe it? How many times do I have to tell them I'm not interested in moving to Washington?"

She had turned down the State Department on several occasions already, even though the idea of having Hillary Clinton as her boss was thrilling. She needed to stay in New York, where Will's unmoveable job was. This kind of persistent recruitment was what happened, though, when you were making a name for yourself the way Lizzy was at HRI. She had nudged the litigation group away from dealing exclusively with immigrant and refugee rights, and gotten the group noticed by carefully choosing a few cases involving the rights of asylum seekers and stateless people. These were big, constitutional issues with a huge impact on a lot of people. The highest-profile case they'd chosen to take on involved some Yemeni prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who were facing no chargeable crimes, but couldn't be released because they didn't want to return to their home country for fear of their own safety. And, their home country wouldn't take them back anyway. It was a violation of their rights to keep them imprisoned when they hadn't even been charged with any crimes, let alone found guilty of anything. Lizzy's group had sued the US government on their behalf and succeeded in getting them asylum in a third country. That was one reason why State took notice.

Now, she told him a little more about the meeting with the official from State. "Anyway. Did you have that thing with, uh—?" She slid into her seat next to him.

"Human Resources."

Ugh. Lizzy made a face, even though, as HR departments went, WPD's wasn't too bad. When it came to women-friendly policies, at least, they had a reputation in the city for being progressive.

Will continued, "Yeah, the workshop for managers. I don't know why I agree to go to these things. Team building or something. Honestly, I would just fire the entire HR department if I could." He picked up his giant falafel sandwich and took a healthy bite.

"Well, why don't you? You're the boss. HR sucks. Bunch of interfering, self-important weasels." Mouth watering, she served herself some pickled beet salad and reached for the hot sauce.

"I wish. You can't do it, you know that. Gotta have rules. We'd get sued. Anyway, the board insisted on this new program." He grabbed his water.

She sighed and took a bite of falafel. With her mouth full she said, "Yeah, I know. Well, what kind of BS did they throw at you this time?"

"Something about a new work evaluation system. TQM and 360 degree evaluations are apparently _so_, like, 2008 or something. I don't know. It's a whole new vocabulary. The usual load of incomprehensible crap."

Lizzy leaned forward, giving him a sly smile. "Oooh, HR jargon. Lay it on me, baby." She waggled her eyebrows at him.

Will laughed and put down his falafel. "Well, first we had to identify the WPD management competencies."

"Oh, yeah. Mmm. Competencies." She smiled at him suggestively and went for the green salad.

"Right. Then there was something about how we had to 'surface priorities.'"

"I love it when you verb nouns. It does _things _to me. What else?"

He thought about it for a minute before continuing, "Um, let's see, one of the managerial competencies is to 'drive results.' We're supposed to drive results. Really hard, I guess." He leered rakishly back at her.

"Seriously?" she laughed. "What is wrong with these people? Do they not hear what they're saying?"

"I don't think they do. Oh, also apparently everything is very _robust _this year. We're going to have a _robust _work evaluation system. With _robust _evaluation criteria, and a _robust _feedback mechanism."

"Robust! I like it. I could work with that," she nodded approvingly. "Can't have a soft, floppy, flaccid feedback mechanism, no sir."

He snickered and changed the subject. "Do you want to head up to Netherfield early tomorrow, or go in the afternoon? It's probably the last time we'll get up there before the baby is born." Jane and Charlie were expecting their second child in a month or so. Jane was big as a house and had said she didn't want to go on any more long car rides after this trip because car travel was getting really uncomfortable for her.

"Oh, well...why don't we get a relatively early start, and maybe we can get in a long bike ride in the afternoon?" They both really enjoyed exploring the Lake George area on their road bikes. The area was cool and hilly with a sprinkling of lakes and ponds, and there was lots of fresh air, but not _too _much nature for their urban sensibilities.

He agreed and moved on to their plans for the evening. Pulling out his iPhone, he said, "What do you want to see?" He read off, "_X-Men: First Class..._uh,_ Bridesmaids_...? Yuck." By this time they had both finished eating, and Lizzy started to cram the remains of their meal back into the bag it had come from.

She shrugged as she squashed a styrofoam container. "Well, we could always stay in and have our own team-building exercise instead. Go, team!" She struck a cheerleading pose, one fist on her hip and an imaginary pom pom held high in the air, before returning to her task.

"Excellent plan. I have some great workshop ideas, myself. Maybe a little role play, for example," Will commented, a tiny smile quirking at the corner of his mouth. He put their dishes and silverware into the dishwasher.

Lizzy dropped the bag she had packed up into the trash and put her arm around Will's waist and nudged him with her hip. "_Real_ly! So, you picked up a few pointers today, did you?"

"Yup, yup. Step right into the conference room and I'll show you my flipcharts."

"Flipcharts! Oh, baby!" Grinning, she grabbed his hand and pulled him down the hallway to their bedroom.

Once they had quite thoroughly surfaced their respective priorities, Will suggested that they work together on more fully developing the team competency in driving results. After the results had been most delightfully driven for some time, Lizzy's feedback mechanism proved to be very robust indeed as she gave the project an extremely enthusiastic evaluation. She was, as always, very glad that the walls in the condo were so thick. Robust, even.

Afterwards, they lay curled together, entangled, peaceful, listening to each other's heartbeats and breaths.

"God, I love you," Lizzy said, from deep down in that calm, still place that only seemed reachable following the intense, exhausting connection of making love, when all the cares of the outside world were finally gone and her overactive brain had finally, finally quieted.

Will was right there with her. "I love you, too. So much." He stroked her face and looked into her eyes, really seeing her, accepting her. She gazed back, almost overcome by the raw feelings she saw in his eloquent eyes. It didn't get any better than this, she knew. Her heart ached with the joy of it. She closed her eyes and tenderly, softly kissed him. He turned to take her more fully in his arms and slowly, slowly they slid even further into oneness.

* * *

The next week, Lizzy turned 34. She and Will went out for a nice dinner at the Thai restaurant where they'd had their first date years ago. They both enjoyed remembering how it had felt when they were first falling in love.

A couple of days later, she had another little celebration with some of her female friends and colleagues. They met after work for a drink. The women were all lawyers, at non-governmental organizations like Lizzy's or at big corporate law firms, and they met sometimes as an informal support group. The six of them barely fit around the high table in the dim tapas bar. The seventh member of the gang had had to beg off, again, because she had to pick up her new baby from daycare. As the women sipped their drinks, talk at the table turned to how she could never come to anything after 5 pm.

"It's obvious it's really limiting her career prospects," commented Paula, who was a senior partner in her early 60s. "This is why my husband and I agreed early on that we wouldn't have children. I just don't think you can be serious about your career and have children."

"Don't you feel you missed out by not having kids, though?" asked Vanessa, a junior associate Lizzy knew from a Yale alumni network. Unbeknownst to the others, Vanessa was three months pregnant. She fiddled with her cranberry juice.

"No, not at all!" said Paula emphatically. "I never wanted to have children anyway."

"Really?" Vanessa looked at her as if she didn't quite believe her..

"No. If you'd ever met my mother, you'd understand why not. Anyway, Greg and I have a great life. We get to travel—"

Audrey, who was 32, happily single, and on track to make partner in record time, interrupted, "God, Vanessa. I don't want to have any kids, either. Why should I have to justify my damn choices all the time?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it that way..." Vanessa rushed to apologize.

Janice, who had been quietly observing, now turned to Lizzy and said, "What do you think, Lizzy? You and Will have been together for a long time now. Do you want to have kids?"

"I don't know what we're going to do. When we got married, we agreed that we both wanted to to, but honestly I don't know how practical it is at this point." As she said it, Lizzy could almost hear her mother's voice telling her she wasn't getting any younger. "What about you, Janice?"

Janice looked down at her hands holding her drink on the table. "Well, I wasn't going to say anything about it, but I guess it doesn't matter now. Steve and I found out a while ago that we can't conceive. We decided to try to adopt a baby from China, and we got part way through the adoption process when it turned out that Steve's childhood leukemia disqualifies us from adopting."

"What?" Lizzy was aghast. "But isn't he fine now? That's so unfair!"

"Yes, he is. But that's the Chinese government's rule, no cancer survivors."

"Oh, I'm so sorry..." commiserated Vanessa. "Will you try somewhere else?"

"No, probably not. I just don't think we could go through all of that again," Janice said, shaking her head. Lizzy, sitting next to her, pressed her hand sympathetically.

"Well, we'll expect great things from you at work, then!" chirped Paula.

Lizzy frowned at her and turned to look at Laura, the one member of the party who hadn't been contributing to the conversation. She was in her late 30s, and she never gave too much away about herself. Lizzy realized that after all this time, she didn't know if Laura was gay or straight, single, partnered or married, a mom or not.

Laura looked back at her and pointed at her own chest as if to say, who, me? She smiled enigmatically. "Just haven't met the right person yet, I guess." And that was all anyone could get out of her that evening or any other day.

* * *

That night after a late dinner they'd had delivered from a nearby Japanese restaurant, Lizzy said to Will, "Sweetie, I had this surreal conversation with my women lawyer friends today, and...anyway, long story short, it got me thinking about the whole kid question again."

"As in, when are we going to have kids?" he asked, stretching his long arm out behind her on the back of the sofa in the living room. They had turned off the lights and were watching the lights in the park across the street. The big windows were the best thing in the room, Lizzy thought, because otherwise it looked like a big, white mausoleum, so cold and formal. Not that she had any opinions about interior design.

"Right. What do you think? Do you still want to?"

"Yeah, I do. I guess we'll have to get our act together soon, though, if we want to. I'm already 39, and pretty soon my swimmers are going to dry up."

Lizzy laughed and punched him lightly on the arm. "Oh, shut up. You know it's my ovaries that are going to shrivel up and blow away first."

"Seriously, is this something you want to do? It changes things, I hear." He looked thoughtful.

"Well, I'm not sure. One of the things we talked about over drinks was the whole 'mommy track' thing. Would people still take me seriously if I had a baby? Could I do my job?"

"Does it matter? You're already at the top of your field."

"Of course it matters! I love everything about my job! Well, just about everything. Maybe I could do with a some new challenges and a little less Andrew," she said, naming the blowhard in the office next door to hers. "I've been at HRI for five years now. I don't know, maybe it's time to move on to something bigger. But anyway, the point is that I love it, I love helping people, I'm good at it, and I just don't know if I can walk away from it, even only partway."

"Yep, you're a real killer, all right," he smiled at her. "Just one of the many things I love about you." He gave her a big sloppy kiss.

"Oh, get out of here," she laughed.

"Come on. You know it's true."

Actually, Lizzy did know it was true. "But could I be a mom and a killer at the same time?"

"Hmm. Wasn't there some politician that the media kept calling a pit bull wearing lipstick? Or a grizzly mom or something? Oh, I remember—" He named a very conservative woman politician who had been in the news lately. "She's totally vicious, and she has a bunch of kids."

"Don't you dare say that woman's name in my house! Not even as a joke." She thought about it for a while. "No, really, is there anyone out there? Any role model at all for that kind of woman?"

Will wiggled his feet on the coffee table as he pondered that question. "How about Justice Goldberg? She's been your role model in lots of ways. She's pretty sharp, and she has a kid."

"Oh, please, she's fabulous, but she's a hundred and sixteen years old. Totally different thing. Different times."

They sat there slumped back against the sofa for a while in silence, holding hands, staring at the ceiling.

Finally, she asked, "What about you? Would it change things for you?"

"Hmm...well, probably not as much as for you."

"It's that easy? Really? Why?"

"Because you're the girl."

She sat up straight and glared at him. "OK, now I'm really mad at you. Don't say crap like that. You know it pisses me off."

"I know, I know. I'm kidding. Mostly. But it's true, probably, as long as I'm at WPD. If I'm running the company, I have to keep working this much. Plus, you would take maternity leave, and I couldn't take paternity leave or whatever that would be called."

"Huh." They sat and thought some more. "Well, let's keep thinking about it."

"OK."

Lizzy jumped up off the sofa. "All right, then, enough of this messing around. I have to go do some work."

Grinning at her, he said, "We don't even have time to have this conversation. How would we have time to have a kid? You do see the irony in this situation, right?"

"Maybe. Now be a good boy and go do your work, too." She came back and kissed his cheek before heading down the hall to her office.

* * *

After that, Lizzy started noticing women and babies all around her, when she was walking to the subway, or swinging by the neighborhood store for cereal, or running in the Park. She began to observe them more and more closely. It wasn't that she fell in love with babies, or even with the idea of having a baby, exactly. It was that she began to see something going on between mothers and babies, and sometimes between fathers and babies, that she thought was interesting and possibly worth having. She couldn't quite put her finger on what it was. She wondered whether maybe this connection she was seeing was something important, a part of the human experience that she wanted to sample. The problem was that she knew she couldn't just sample it—it was all or nothing. She didn't talk about it with anyone, not Will, or her best friend Charlotte, or Jane, because it wasn't something she was ready to articulate yet.

A few weeks later, Jane had her baby, a boy named Tyler. Lizzy and Will drove to Westchester to meet him in the hospital the day he was born. He was so ugly that he was cute: red, strangely hairy, flaky, wrinkled, and covered in waxy white junk. When they walked into the hospital room, Jane was lying exhausted and strung out in the slanted bed after an unexpectedly intense and 100% natural labor and delivery. Tyler started crying, so Charlie handed him over to Jane, who, just like that, shoved open her hospital gown and whipped out her boob and started nursing him. Lizzy looked at them, all Madonna and Child with Charlie gazing on, enraptured, enfolding them. Somewhere inside her she felt something change—puzzle pieces fitting together, or an elegant solution to a math problem magically presenting itself, or maybe a mysterious and heretofore inactive gland suddenly squirting hormones into her system, and she thought: I want that. Damn the consequences. She looked at Will and she could see that he was thinking the same thing.

In the car on the way back to the city, she took Will's hand and said, "I want us to be a family like that. I mean, you really already are my family. But I want us to be like _that_. What do you think? Is it time?"

He squeezed her hand back and replied, "Yeah, I think so."

And that was that. They agreed not to talk with their friends and family about it, just in case things didn't work out.

* * *

At first, they tried the carpet-bombing technique: they had unprotected sex a lot, whenever the mood struck them. That was a lot of fun. But the pregnancy test came back negative every month for three months. Lizzy finally decided to ask Jane for her advice, because she had had some trouble conceiving her first child.

"Too soon for a fertility specialist," Jane said over the phone, once she had stopped exclaiming and sighing and squealing about Lizzy's news. Lizzy could hear baby Tyler cooing and toddler Aiden singing "head, shoulders, knees and toes" in the background.

"The best thing to try next is charting your temperature so you know when you're ovulating." She suggested a book Lizzy could look at about controlling her fertility naturally.

So Lizzy started charting, and she and Will entered the living hell of obligatory conception sex, which was no fun at all. It had nothing whatsoever to do with sexual desire and everything to do with the timing of eggs popping forth from her ovaries.

Finally, on January 15, 2012, after sixth months of trying, good news arrived at last. Lizzy and Will sat together on the edge of the bathtub, each with one eye glued to the second hand of Will's watch spinning around and the other on the pregnancy test stick (1).

"Look! Look!" Lizzy pointed to the blue line in the little window, slowly getting darker and more pronounced.

"Yeah!" Will shouted. He never shouted.

The second hand made its way back around to the twelve one last time, and the line was clearly dark blue. She was pregnant. They sat holding each other, perched on the side of the tub for a long time. Lizzy's eyes stung a little with happy tears.

Things were going to change. But how?

* * *

_Footnotes:_

(1) In the US, you can take an early home pregnancy test about a week after ovulation/conception, and that's what Lizzy and Will have done. Often an OB/Gyn won't even bother to do a pregnancy test in the office if the home test comes back positive.

* * *

_Please do drop me a comment, if you feel so inclined, about whether this is a well-considered decision. I always love to hear what you think and appreciate your taking the time to leave a review.  
_


	2. Chapter 2

_Thanks to everyone who left a review for Chapter 1. They're all much appreciated. Many thanks also to my betas, Jan, Barbara, and Alison._

**Chapter 2**

After the pregnancy test came back positive, Lizzy and Will floated along for a long eleven weeks in an excited fog(1). Lizzy hummed her way through cocktail parties at Will's club and other tedious social events that normally would have set her teeth on edge. The stolen glances and secret smiles she shared with him fortified her against the banal conversation of society matrons. They waited to tell anyone except Jane and Charlie until they got the fetal test results back during the twelfth week. Fortunately, everything was normal.

Will became obsessed with looking at photos of fetal gestation and for some reason developed a scale for describing the size of the baby that compared it primarily to citrus fruit. "This week it's the size of a lemon seed!" "This week it's the size of a small lime!" He eagerly went with her to the doctor's office to see the ultrasounds of the baby. If he had had his way, they would have had a few extra ultrasounds or maybe even bought themselves their very own ultrasound machine so they could take pictures any time they felt like it. But that seemed a little too crazy and Tom Cruise-ish in the end so he settled for just the standard couple of ultrasounds. The OB/Gyn recommended limiting them since nobody knew what the effects might be on the baby.

Jane was ecstatic when she heard the news. She gave Lizzy all of her pregnancy books and sent her links to her favorite childbirth and pregnancy websites: naturalbaby. com, organicmom. com, organicbaby. com, and yourinnergoddess. com. Lizzy gobbled all of them up, usually while she was on the elliptical trainer in the exercise room at home. She also read all the parenting magazines she could find. She even secretly read some of the books that Jane told her to avoid, like _What To Expect When You're Expecting_, which Jane said should actually be entitled _Don't Do That Or You Will Accidentally Kill Your Baby_. Jane had a lot of strong opinions about these things, the result of her expertise in child development. And, she was putting it all to good use herself with both of her beautiful little boys.

Lizzy liked the certainty with which Jane talked about this stuff because she, herself, felt quite out of her element. It was nice to have such an informed consultant, an expert on all baby-related matters, who could tell her the right things to do. She was used to using consultants. Outside expertise was always a good thing when you didn't have the skills in-house.

Once the first trimester was over and they had begun to share the news with friends and family, and, of course, Lizzy's boss, Lizzy and Will started planning for the baby's arrival in earnest. It was all like a really complex work project, Lizzy thought, and you could deal with it if you broke it down into manageable pieces. Will set up a very complicated spreadsheet showing all the different tasks they needed to complete by what date: setting up a nursery, hiring a nanny, buying a car seat, getting on the waiting list of the preschool at the Renwick Preparatory Academy for Boys and Girls...She argued for a less snooty school with some diversity and families from all different walks of life, but he wouldn't hear of it. Fitzwilliams had always gone to Renwick, and anyway there were security issues. She sighed and acquiesced.

At 16 weeks, following an amniocentesis that the doctor ordered because of Lizzy's supposedly advanced maternal age, Lizzy and Will were both thrilled to find out that the baby was a girl, even though they would have been just as ecstatic if it had been a boy. They spent hours reading baby name books and finally agreed on one that they both liked: Emma. Later they found out that about one in five girls in the Upper East Side was named Emma, but by then they didn't care because the name was special to them.

Then they had a long negotiation about the rest of her name. Bennet-Darcy? Darcy-Bennet? Which should go first? Anyway they both sounded stupid. What about combining their last names: Darnet? Benarcy? That sounded even stupider. Besides, Will didn't like the idea of the Darcy name disappearing altogether. In the end they agreed on Bennet for the middle name and Darcy for the last name. It turned out the family name wasn't as important to her as she'd originally thought, and anyway Bennet was in there somewhere.

Overall, it was an uneventful, healthy and rather easy pregnancy. Lizzy hadn't felt too sick the first trimester, and now she felt pretty good during the second. With Jane's help, she bought a series of new, chic suits as her tummy got bigger. She gained about 35 pounds, which was a little more than what her OB-Gyn, Dr. Dasgupta, told her was ideal. She wasn't too worried because she figured she'd be able to work that off pretty fast with her usual exercise routine after the baby was born. She'd never had a problem with her weight, probably because she was so hyperactive.

Armed with Jane's expertise about how to have a healthy pregnancy, Lizzy felt confident and in control because she knew she was doing the right things. She dutifully avoided eating and drinking all the things the books said to avoid: cold cuts, sushi, caffeine, alcohol, and basically anything that tasted good or was any fun. She couldn't even eat her beloved hot sauce because it gave her heartburn. Will restrained himself from eating the stuff she couldn't have when they had a meal together. One time, though, he came home smelling of wasabi and soy sauce from a sushi lunch. She was so jealous that she made him go back out again in the rain to buy her some unagi and cucumber rolls, which didn't contain any raw fish and so were safe for her to eat.

* * *

At the end of March, Lizzy figured she had better break the news to the women lawyers support group before they heard about it somewhere else. She was not exactly looking forward to it. There had been a little bit of a kerfuffle when Vanessa had announced to the group that she was having a baby the previous summer, and Paula had told her that her career was now officially over. Vanessa and Paula seemed to have reached some kind of détente eventually, but Vanessa hadn't been back to the group since her baby's birth in January.

When the group met at their favorite tapas bar, Lizzy ordered a cranberry juice and Audrey, the young single woman, looked at her suspiciously.

"Is there something you want to tell us, Lizzy?" she asked.

"Why yes, there is, I'm so glad you asked. I am very, very happy to announce that Will and I are expecting a baby in October."

"Well, I can't say that I'm surprised," said Paula, looking miffed. "But are you sure you want to throw your career away like this?"

"Paula!" protested Janice, and even Audrey looked slightly disturbed. Laura didn't say anything, as usual.

Lizzy took a deep breath and tried to tamp down her anger. She had known this was coming, and she'd prepared a speech especially for the occasion. "Paula, I understand your reaction, but my career is not over, and I'm not throwing anything away. Lots of women are making it work, having kids and successful careers. Please also don't forget that my job doesn't require the same time commitment as the partnership track."

She had thought about Paula's reaction a lot since the blowup with Vanessa. She didn't think that the problem was as simple as Paula's being a huge ass, because really she wasn't. In fact, she was very supportive of other women, and a good mentor for younger men, too. She just seemed to have some kind of a blind spot on this subject, although Lizzy didn't want to assume too much about why. She decided to ask.

Gently, she said, "So, I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about why you're so sure that babies spell the end of it all."

"I've just seen it happen so many times in the last thirty years. Mothers cut back on hours, they don't make partner, they walk away because it's too hard." Paula sounded really angry about this.

Janice interjected, "What about all the innovations in maternity leave policies and part-time work during the early childhood years? I think they've been having a profound impact in the last decade or so. More women are making partner than ever before, even women with children."

Paula had cooled off a little while listening to Janice. "I guess that's true, in spite of the problems the 'mommy track' creates. We just worked so hard for women to get a seat at the table in the first place. It's tough to see the younger women reject that, and not only _accept _but _ask _for this secondary position."

"Well, I see what you mean," soothed Lizzy. "But thanks to the women who came before us, I think we do have more choices now, and that's good, right?"

"Yeah, it's good. When I started out, you really had to choose one or the other, career or family. There was no way to do both," Paula said. She didn't look regretful, although she did look, for lack of a better word, sad.

It suddenly dawned on Lizzy that part of what Paula was struggling with in all of this was that, maybe unconsciously, she saw the younger women's decisions as saying her hard work opening doors for them hadn't been useful or valuable. And, she also saw it as a criticism of her own choices long ago. Paula really loved the law—you could hear it in how she talked about it. But in her generation, it had been pretty much impossible to reject the stark either/or choice, and she'd loved being a lawyer so much that the right path was obvious. If things had been different, maybe she would have wanted to have kids. But then again, maybe not. Perhaps, Lizzy thought, Paula thought that the younger women were telling her that if only she had tried harder, _she _could have made it work, too, had it all, even though they all knew that hadn't, as a rule, been true then.

Lizzy put her hand on Paula's on the table. "Hey, don't worry. I'll be back. I won't let you down."

Paula smiled back at her, again a little sadly. "You couldn't, really. I'm already so proud of all of you."

* * *

Soon after, during one of their frequent phone calls, Jane told Lizzy that whether she liked it or not, she had to have a baby shower. Lizzy protested, saying she didn't have time, and anyway, she and Will could buy whatever they needed on their own.

Jane said, "No! Other people will want to give you presents, and you have to let them. It's all part of a community-building process. And you have to sign up for a baby registry, too."

Lizzy protested that she would feel like a jerk making a list of stuff for other people to buy for them, when there really wasn't anything she needed. They had had this same conversation about a wedding registry a few years before.

Again Jane said, "No! People want guidance about what to buy. It makes things easier for them. And anyway, you can't even _imagine _what they will give you if you don't tell them what you want," she shuddered.

So Lizzy and Will sat down at their place one Saturday afternoon with Jane to look at a high-end baby store website and set up a registry. Aiden and Tyler played quietly on the living room carpet while the adults stared at the laptop sitting on the coffee table. After a while, Jane put Tyler down for a nap in his pack-and-play, and not long after that Aiden went down for his nap on Lizzy's and Will's bed.

Jane helped them tick off all the things that they would need in order to have a happy, healthy, and, most importantly, safe baby. Apparently it required a million gadgets and gizmos, and all of them had to be organic, unbleached, non-toxic, and safety-rated. No plastic toys! Ever! Any unavoidable plastic had to be proven phthalate-free.

"Seriously?" protested Lizzy. "We have to have an organic, unbleached cotton papasan swing with a five-point harness? And two different kinds of baby slings and three nursing capes? Isn't this all a little excessive?"

But Jane insisted that every bit of it was vitally necessary. She didn't want some horrible polyester blend swing cover to give her baby's delicate skin a rash, right? When he heard that, Will had to agree. So Lizzy gave in because she knew she'd lose a fight about this anyway.

"Oh, before I forget," Jane said, "you'll need to sign up with a diaper service. You can't use disposable diapers. They're bad for the environment, and they're bad for the baby's skin, too. Dioxins." Will made a note on the legal pad.

"Also," Jane said, "after you choose a theme for the baby's room, then we can register you for furnishings and that kind of thing."

Lizzy wasn't really sure what she meant by furnishings. Was that the same as furniture?

Before she got too far down that unproductive line of thought, Will nodded and said, "OK, we'll get the interior decorator to take care of that."

"We will?" Lizzy was surprised. She didn't remember having discussed this.

"Yeah, of course. We can't do that ourselves. I'll text Ahmed right now and ask him to make an appointment with Sherry." Will pulled out his iPhone and started texting his super-efficient PA.

Lizzy didn't know or care about interior decorating and normally would have been fine with letting a professional deal with it. But the baby's room felt a little different somehow, special, not like the dining room or something. It wasn't that she'd ever dreamed about decorating a baby's room, but just handing this off to someone? Really?

"Now, wait a second. Let's talk about this," she said, just as Will hit send.

"What? She'll take care of everything. Probably we'll just have to choose a color or something. That's all I had to do when I re-did this place. It was easy."

Lizzy decided to let it go. She was too busy for a project like that, and basically she didn't care, anyway. "OK, you and Sherry can work it out." She paused, briefly imagining what over-the-top girly scheme Will would come up with in his current mood. "Only, no pink. It's oppressive. And no princesses."

Jane, who had been observing the back-and-forth with some interest and amusement, chose to break in here. "Right, something gender-neutral is a good idea. There are some really nice sea-foam greens out this year. That's a good choice. It's soothing, helps the baby sleep peacefully."

Lizzy rolled her eyes when she heard "sea-foam green" because that was treading dangerously close to totally-don't-give-a-crap design territory.

"OK, then! Is that it?" Lizzy was ready to wrap things up. She had stuff to do, illegally imprisoned people to get out of jail.

"Oh, wait!" said Will. He had just noticed the special occasion dresses section of the website. "Oh! That looks just like a little dress Georgie used to have..." he sighed.

"She'll look like a Madame Alexander doll in that, Will," said Lizzy sardonically. She was amused by his sudden obsession with a red velvet dress with big black bows on it.

"No, it's not very practical, either," said Jane. "But maybe for something special. Christmas, maybe? Let's make sure we get the right size for Christmas."

Will nodded happily and they added it to the list, along with several others that he found he couldn't possibly live without. Lizzy snickered.

Finally Jane said, "OK, we're almost done. But there are two really significant purchases that you need to think very hard about. It's important to get these right. One, a stroller-car seat combo, and two, a breast pump."

Will got a funny expression on his face when he heard the last part. On the one hand, he sort of perked up a little, but then he simultaneously looked somewhat disturbed and slightly grossed out.

Lizzy laughed at him. "What's that face for, sweetie?"

Jane laughed, too. "I've seen that look on Charlie before. It's the combination of 'breast' and 'pump' that worries them. Don't worry, he'll get used to it."

"Oh, I see. Breast equals awesome, pump equals sinister and dangerous, right?" Lizzy teased.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Will deadpanned.

They settled on the very expensive pump that came in a professional-looking briefcase, and moved along to the strollers and car seats. Jane explained all about them.

"Taking into consideration safety ratings, ease of use, cargo space, and design, I recommend the Ellipse. What I particularly like about it for you guys is that it's great for an urban family. The car seat base is super easy to install and pop out, so you can get into and out of a taxi in a flash."

This was all completely over Lizzy's head, so she said, "Yeah, OK," and Will agreed more enthusiastically.

Jane clicked on the bassinet attachment and all the other absolutely essential stroller accessories, and it all added up to almost $3000, plus tax.

"Holy fucking shit!" cried Lizzy. "Three thousand dollars for a stroller?" After all this time with Will, she still found this kind of thing hard to deal with. It was too much.

"Lizzy!" Jane admonished. "Not in front of the kids," even though they were both asleep.

"Sorry..." Lizzy clamped her hand over her mouth.

Will said, "I don't know. Sounds reasonable to me, if it's good and it's got all the stuff we need."

Lizzy completely threw in the towel then. Moderation and restraint were clearly lost on these two nutcases with baby fever.

* * *

The baby shower was at Jane and Charlie's place in Westchester on a Sunday afternoon in July. She insisted that they not have it at Lizzy and Will's place because that would be tacky, even though most of their friends lived in the city so Westchester wasn't convenient for them at all.

In turn, Lizzy insisted that it be a co-ed shower, and she also insisted that there be no stupid games where you had to name baby animals or humiliating displays involving her growing stomach.

The attendees were an interesting cross-section of Lizzy and Will's lives in New York. Some of her friends from Columbia were there, as were a couple of her friends and classmates from Yale who were now living in New York. One of the other junior associates she had known at DeWitt came, as did most of the women from her women lawyers support group: Vanessa was there with her 6-month-old, and even Paula showed up, to Lizzy's mild surprise. Carla and Valerie, the wives of men from Will's athletic club, women she'd become friendly with when the couples socialized periodically, also attended.

Lydia and her older girlfriend Susanna, who lived together in the city, came, too, but both Mary and Lillian stayed home. They both said it was too far to travel from Artemis and Rochester, respectively, for only one afternoon. Aunt Maddie came in from Boston, although she didn't bring the girls. Donna, the director of the women's shelter where Lizzy had volunteered for years and now sat on the Board of Directors, came, and so did several of the other longtime volunteers. Lizzy's staff assistant, Gina, was there, along with several other staffers from HRI.

Caroline had sent her effusive, flowery, insincere regrets and mailed off an extravagant gift instead. But Louisa Hurst came and sat in the corner unobtrusively with her toddler.

Lizzy didn't really have much of a chance to talk to any of them in depth, but it was great to see all these women in her life in one place.

And it was almost all women. In fact, although it was officially a co-ed shower, Will, Charlie, and Lizzy's second-in-command, Kyle, were the only men who showed up. They sat there shifting uncomfortably in their chairs while the women sighed and oohed and aahed over the gifts as Lizzy unwrapped them on the elegantly appointed patio in Jane's backyard following a beautifully catered lunch.

Lizzy did appreciate the gifts, many of which, while not on the registry, were very thoughtful because they were things that friends said had really helped them with their own babies. Iris, her Yale housemate who was now a biochemist at NYU, said the cute little swaddling wrap had helped her son calm down like nothing else. And Vanessa absolutely swore by the baby hammock she gave them, saying it had saved her sanity more than once.

But what Lizzy appreciated more than that was all the people who came to show their support and their joy. She knew it took a village to raise a kid, and this was her village.

* * *

After the shower, Lizzy and Will continued to receive gifts, far too many in Lizzy's opinion. And Jane was right—in spite of the guidance offered by the registry, some people still sent them things that were really, really weird: a child leash, an umbilical cord stub display case, a six-pack of rectal thermometers. One of her distant relatives sent them a whole stack of different sizes of waterproof pads, and another a pack of 50 cotton towel thingies. What the hell were they for? Someone even gave them a nasty little navy blue Baby Bjorn baby carrier. Those things were just awful. Thank goodness most other people had stuck to the list. Lizzy and Will amused themselves with a game wherein they tried to guess how you were supposed to use half of the stuff. It's a flotation device! It's a hat! Oh, it's a nursing pillow.

Lizzy almost busted a gut laughing when not one, not two, but _three _of Will's great aunts sent them engraved silver spoons.

As a result of all this largesse, and also after repeated visits from Sherry the interior designer and her in-house painter, they had the nursery all ready to go with plenty of time to spare. It was a nice gender-neutral pale green and yellow. Jane came by to see it and was really pleased with the calming atmosphere. She said that the baby would sleep and sleep and sleep in this beautiful calm environment.

All the gifts meant a whole lot of thank-you cards to be sent. When Lizzy and Will sat down at the breakfast nook table with a huge stack all ready to be written, Will complained, "Can't we just have Ahmed write them, or print them out or something, and then we can sign them?"

Lizzy was not her mother's daughter for nothing. "What? No! Be serious. You wanted all this stuff, and now you have to pay the price. I'm writing half, and you're writing half. Here, take a card. Don't forget to mention what the gift was. Jane made us a list of all the gifts at the shower, and I turned it into a spreadsheet. You do all the odd numbers."

Will grumbled about how it would be so much more efficient just to do a form letter with a merge where you could insert the name and the gift, but he did his half.

* * *

Lizzy knew that finding the right nanny was super important, so she had made that a top priority. By week 24, they had engaged a very exclusive nanny agency's services and interviewed candidates. The agency's fees were ridiculously high, but it promised candidates with impeccable credentials, thorough background checks, guaranteed backup care, payroll services, paid vacations and medical insurance for the nanny, and a replacement if things didn't work out. In the end, Lizzy and Will signed a contract with a great woman named Elena Reynaldo who would be ready to start in early December when Lizzy went back to work. Lizzy really liked her because she was a no-nonsense kind of person but also gave off a loving vibe when she was with children. They had observed her interacting with the kids in the family where she currently worked. She would live out, and she would be at their place 8 to 6 Monday through Friday.

Lizzy was committed to having a more reasonable-length workday, so she used Elena's hours to create that limit for herself. Of course she might have to work at night after the baby went to sleep sometimes, but that, she determined, was the price she was willing to pay for having a family life.

"Are you sure you want to wait so long for Elena to start?" asked Will one evening as they were sitting in their big, white living room after dinner. "You know, she could start coming as soon as the baby is born, and help you out with things."

"Like what? Staring at my baby and going all googly-eyed about how beautiful she is?" Lizzy scoffed.

"No, there's a lot to do with a newborn. I remember that from when Georgie was born. Her nanny, Mrs. Martinez, was there right from the start. I'll show you." Lizzy followed him down the hall as he headed to his office in search of family photo albums.

Lizzy and Will sat on the leather sofa in the office to go through the pictures. Sure enough, Mrs. Martinez was in most of the candids of baby Georgie. She was a motherly, round-looking middle-aged woman from Puerto Rico, and she seemed to be holding Georgie in most of the photos. She would have stood out among all the tall, patrician white people around her, except that the photographer so obviously conceived of her as part of the background, rather than the subject, of the photos. Here was her arm holding Georgie, here her shoulder and her ear, here her leg with Georgie hanging onto it.

Lizzy asked, "Are there any photos with all of Mrs. Martinez's face? I can't quite tell what she looks like."

"Oh, I don't know..." Will leafed through the books. "Sorry, I guess not."

"Hmmph."

"What was that for?" Will asked.

"She worked for your family for how long, and you don't have any pictures of her?" Lizzy was incredulous.

Will shrugged. "I don't know, I think she lived with us until Georgie was in middle school. I guess we didn't usually take pictures with the staff."

"Oh, the staff, huh? How many people worked for your family?"

"Well, you know, it was a bigger place than this," Will said defensively. Lizzy smirked, because their apartment had five bedrooms and a huge living room and five and a half baths and a big ballroom off to the side and a home gym and an entertainment room. He continued, "Let's see if I can remember. Well, there was my nanny, Mrs. Llwellyn, but she retired and went back to England when I was about ten."

Lizzy snickered and said, "Oh my God. You had Mary Poppins for a nanny, didn't you?"

Will glared at her and continued, "That was right before Georgie was born. That's when Mrs. Martinez came. We had, um, a housekeeper, Mrs. Morrison, who did most of the cooking and stuff like that. And a driver. Cleaning staff."

Ah, she thought. This explained some things. "What, no butler? No gardener?" she quipped. He really had no idea.

"I see what you're doing here. Of course we didn't have a gardener at our place here in the city. We didn't have a garden. Well, we had a roof garden. Marcus took care of that."

"And who is this Marcus?"

"I don't know his _title_." He was starting to get a little annoyed with her. "You know, there were various staff members around. Personal assistants and that kind of thing. What's the big deal? I have a PA now."

It was true, Will did have a PA, Ahmed. But Ahmed stayed at the office.

"I'm just curious."

Will knew by now that she was working on something when she said something like that.

He nudged her. "What?"

"You know, I'm just wondering. You told me a long time ago that your mom was a housewife, that she took care of you and your dad and Georgie, right?" She diplomatically did not mention that this discussion had occurred in the middle of the fight that had precipitated their breakup and been a major turning point in making them both rethink their relationship.

"Yeah, that's right."

"Well, I mean, what exactly did she do all day? She didn't clean, or cook, or drive you around, or take care of the baby. Or decorate." Lizzy knew that Will's mom had used the same interior decorator he'd hired to fix up his place when he'd inherited it from his grandmother. "Did she plan parties or events or something?"

Will pondered this question for a while. "No, a social organizer did that, same as I have now." He thought some more. "I think she did some stuff at the Trust. I guess I'm not really sure what she did. That's weird."

"So, is this kind of how you expect our household to run once the baby comes? I just, uh, I don't think I can live like that."

"Oh, I know that. Obviously. We're not running that kind of operation right now, anyway."

"That's true." With just the two of them, eating out or ordering in most of the time, there wasn't that much housework. The building had a cleaning service, and the cleaners came in three times a week. Lizzy had never been at home when they came in, but she could see that they tidied up and vacuumed and cleaned the bathrooms and ran the half-empty dishwasher and so on. They also picked up the bags of dirty laundry and dry cleaning and returned the clean ones.

"Anyway, are you sure you don't want Elena to start earlier? Sure you want to wait till the last minute?"

Lizzy shook her head. "No, I think I can handle it myself. I want to, actually. Unless I'm working, I just don't see the point of having someone take care of the baby. I'm OK with paying someone to clean the house, but paying someone to take care of a kid from day one seems different to me."

"Why is that?"

"A baby is different! It's not like gardening or cleaning, where you just hire someone to do it if you don't feel like doing it yourself."

Will was perplexed "I don't know. I don't see anything wrong with hiring someone to do stuff you don't want to do. You know, problem solved."

"OK, I can see we aren't on the same page here. But anyway, the point is, I want to take care of the baby myself to start with. Those are really important weeks in the bonding process, that's what all the books say. I won't be around as much after I go back to work, so it's especially important to do it right early on. It's what Jane says, too. I just think there are certain things that people should do for themselves. It's what responsible adults do."

"Like what? We already don't do any cooking or cleaning, and you don't seem to mind that."

"It's not that simple," she said, although deep down she knew that he was mostly right about that part, at least. Her position wasn't completely consistent. It was just that anything that smacked of having _servants _really offended her middle-class sensibilities. "I can't explain it. Anyway, the point is, this is how I want to do it. This is what I feel comfortable with."

He nodded. "OK, if it's important to you, that's what we'll do."

* * *

Around week 28, they managed to squeeze in a childbirth class around some trips Will had to take to Copenhagen, where WPD was working out a deal to invest in a new wind power project. The class was at the hospital where they'd give birth, and it took up two whole Saturdays.

At the end of the class, Lizzy had a birth plan all worked out and she was feeling confident that, with the midwives on staff at the hospital, they'd be able to have the kind of childbirth experience that they wanted: classical music, birth ball, epidural only if necessary, lots of walking around, no being tethered to some IV stand or being hooked up to monitors.

Will was ready, too. He had read up on pain management techniques and breathing exercises and all the things he could do to help coach her through the labor and delivery. Unlike some of the other men in the class who had run out of the room to vomit when they saw the birthing documentary, he was not intimidated or frightened. He was looking forward to catching Emma when she was born.

By week 32, they had everything all set and totally under control. Lizzy felt a little bit as though she were all dressed up with nowhere to go, because it was still two months till the due date.

That Saturday evening Lizzy and Will sat together on the sofa in the big white mausoleum-cum-living room looking out at the lights in Central Park.

"Just eight more weeks to go," Lizzy said. "Excited?"

This was a joke between them, because Will was so excited that he sort of vibrated any time anyone mentioned the baby.

He took her hand and laughed softly to himself. "Yeah. Little bit."

"It still doesn't quite feel real to me."

"What do you mean? There she is." He rubbed her swelling tummy.

"Well, I mean, in eight weeks we'll have a real live baby. What's that going to be like?" She felt like she was trying to look down the road leading to the future, but it was foggy and she couldn't make anything out.

"That's right. She'll be a beautiful mix of you and me." His eyes sparkled.

"Let's hope she gets the right parts of both of us. Don't want her to be 6 foot 5 with my knobby knees and work ethic."

Will laughed. "True, but that's not really what I meant. What I meant was, you know, she'll be part of me, and part of you, together, forever." Now she could see that his eyes were sparkling not only with excitement, but also with emotion. Her sentimental husband.

"OK, so, like, our love made manifest or something?" she teased affectionately. She didn't always understand his sentimentality, but she thought it was sweet.

"Yeah, something like that."

Lizzy put her arms around him, rested her head on his chest, and smiled to herself.

"You're going to be such a great dad."

"You, too. A great mom, I mean."

Lizzy snuggled in closer and closed her eyes. She had been feeling a little slower and more tired lately. She drifted off to sleep with the feel of his gentle butterfly kisses on the top of her head. She dreamed of their beautiful angel baby smiling and floating on a soft, puffy cloud before Will stroked her arm to wake her just enough so he could help her stumble, still half asleep, to bed.

* * *

Lizzy went full bore at work until the last four weeks or so of her pregnancy. Then she really started to feel it—for the first time in her pregnancy, she was deeply, deeply tired. And also anxious to get on with it, because she was pretty sick of hauling her huge self around like this. She had to stop volunteering weekly at the women's shelter, and sent them a huge boatload of money to make up for it, over and above the boatload she already gave them every month. She ended up asking Kyle, her second-in-command, to take over a couple of projects earlier than expected because she just didn't have the energy. She tried to think of it as a way to transition into her maternity leave.

She also smuggled a pillow and blanket into her office and started taking short mid-afternoon naps under her desk after asking Gina to hold her calls. The biggest problem with this plan was trying to get up afterwards. One day in her 38th week, she found that she could roll or wiggle her way up to a half-kneeling position, but she couldn't stand up no matter how hard she tried. So she shoved her pillow and blanket into her desk's file drawer and called Gina on her cell phone to ask for her help in standing up. She told Gina that she had dropped a pencil under the desk and gotten stuck trying to retrieve it, but she wasn't sure whether Gina believed her. Especially since there was no pencil in sight.

Will decided he wasn't going to take any more business trips out of town during the last month of her pregnancy, just in case. She was glad, just in case.

* * *

The week before her due date, Lizzy had lunch with Charlotte at their favorite Greek diner. Lizzy puffed into the restaurant and hauled herself into her chair with all the grace a woman in her 39th week of pregnancy can muster. She was bone-tired. That week she had been rushing to get a few last things finished before she went on leave, making sure Kyle was ready to take over all the projects in progress, delegating future work to various other people, seeing to it that her staff felt ready for her absence. It was driving her crazy that she didn't have any control over when, exactly, the baby would come. It could be in five minutes, or it might be in ten days. Aargh.

Charlotte was, as always, ready to vent as soon as the USS Lizzy had finally managed to dock safely in her berth.

"So my boss, Angela, tells me she has this great idea to help solve the problems of poor women in cities in India who don't have access to toilets. Did you see the article about that in _The Times_ a few weeks ago?"

Lizzy nodded. Angela, the president of the international development non-profit, AmeriCaring, where Charlotte worked, had gotten a lot of harebrained ideas for development projects from reading _The New York Times_.

"Well, then you know it's a really big problem. You have to pay to use the public toilets, except for the urinals, and a lot of poor women can't afford it, so they hold it all day. Can you imagine?"

"No, especially not right now," she said, pointing to her huge belly. "Be right back." All this talk about peeing had, naturally, given her the urge.

When she came back from the restroom, Charlotte continued,

"So her idea is that we should sell women these special, really cheap plastic bags that they can use wherever and whenever they want. And so I'm like, what are these women going to do with all of the full plastic bags? Environmental catastrophe! And where, exactly, are they going to do all this peeing? This is a country where women are so modest that some toilet projects have failed because the stall doors didn't go all the way to the ground, and women wouldn't use them because their feet showed! God!"

"Charlotte, I know this is really important. But can we please not talk about bodily functions at the table? You know I'm squeamish about that." She scrunched up her nose and made a "bleh" sound.

"I know, I know. You're going to have to get over that soon, you know."

Lizzy shook her head. "Yeah, I don't think so."

Charlotte laughed. She and her husband, Liam, who was a sculptor and earned a living as a manager at a Gap store in Queens, had a 2-year-old daughter named Chloe. "Well, we'll see. Have you ever even changed a diaper?"

"Yes, you know I did, when I babysat in high school."

"Yeah, and I remember how you almost threw up when little Danny's pants—"

Lizzy put up her hand, laughing. "Oh, please, don't, it'll give me flashbacks. Let's change the subject."

"OK, OK. So, you hired a nanny, right?"

"Yup. We hired a great woman named Elena to start when I go back to work."

"And when is that?" Charlotte inquired.

"HRI is giving me eight weeks of paid maternity leave. So, the first week in December. That's the plan."

"Oh, that must be nice." Charlotte sounded a little grumpy about this.

"Umm...?" Lizzy raised her eyebrows questioningly.

Charlotte said dismissively, "I only took six weeks. Anyway, what's the deal with Elena?"

"She's super, really sweet. She had great references, lots of experience, raised three kids of her own. They're grown up now. We agreed that she's only going speak to Emma in Spanish. She's from the Dominican Republic. Did you see that article in _The Times_ about how being bilingual helps kids' brains develop? Plus, it's a real advantage to speak good Spanish in New York."

Charlotte looked at Lizzy speculatively. "You really have no concept of how your life is going to change in a week, do you?"

Lizzy scoffed, "Of course I know it's going to be different. Please!"

"I don't know. It's hard to imagine until you've been through it yourself."

"Don't give me that 'you can't possibly understand' crap, Charlotte. I'm really, really good at time management. I wouldn't be where I am now otherwise. We have a plan. I've got it all worked out. I mean, millions of women do it every year, so it can't be that hard, right?"

Charlotte snapped her mouth shut. Hard. Then she changed the subject. They were old friends, and she knew when it was time to do that.

* * *

Lizzy worked up until the day before the due date. Late in the afternoon, she started feeling a little off in a way she couldn't quite describe. She sort of thought this might be it. So, she tied up a few loose ends with Kyle and Gina, and with a couple of other staff members they walked one last time through where important files were, and which projects people would be working on for the next eight weeks or so. They knew it was OK to call if they needed her for anything. She knocked off a little early for the evening, around 5 o'clock. She tidied up her desk, said so long to her staff, and waddled down to the town car that Will had insisted she use for her commute for the last month.

The next morning, very early, Lizzy went into labor. Will drove her to the hospital, where they might as well have just torn up the birth plan because nothing went as they intended. She narrowly avoided having a C-section, and had to give up on the idea of a drug-free birth when Emma got stuck for a while during the pushing phase. There was no classical music, there were loads of fetal monitors, and what with all the medical interventions, Will was reduced to being a passive bystander for the last few hours except for reaching around through tubes and wires to hold Lizzy's hand while she pushed. He didn't even get to catch Emma because the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. But about 20 hours after the whole thing started, Emma was born, 8 pounds 14 ounces, healthy, and screaming at the top of her lungs.

And that was the end of life as they knew it.

_Footnotes:_

(1) In the US, a series of prenatal screening tests are usually given near the end of the first trimester of pregnancy, somewhere between 9 and 13 weeks. In addition, Americans are told that the risk of miscarriage decreases significantly after the 12th week. Because of this, many couples choose not to share news of a pregnancy until after the 12th week, in other words at the beginning of the second trimester.

_If you feel so inclined, please let me know how unprepared for the realities of parenthood you think Lizzy and Will are. I always love to hear from you._


	3. Chapter 3

_A/N: Thanks so much for the reviews! I always love to get them.  
_

* * *

**Chapter 3**

_The Artemis Journal_

_October 20, 2012_

_Births_

_Outside Our Region_

_DARCY: William Prentiss Darcy IV and Elizabeth Gardiner Bennet, New York, NY, a daughter, Emma Bennet Darcy, October 5, 2012._

* * *

Lizzy, Will and Emma returned home from the hospital after a couple of sleepless nights and two days jammed full of tests, questions, and visits from the pediatrician, the lactation consultant, and various other specialists (1). They settled joyously and tiredly into trying to figure out everything about Emma. Will took the week off from work to pitch in.

Lizzy's mother, Lillian, had offered, with obvious reluctance, to come to the city to assist. Lizzy and her parents had patched things up, more or less, after the rocky period around the time of Lydia's OD five years before. They had never acknowledged their role in Lydia's problems. Lillian was still drinking too much. Even so, Lizzy and Will had agreed that it was better to keep the channels of communication open, while not getting together too often. So Lizzy had thanked her and declined, to everyone's relief.

Instead, just after they got home from the hospital, Lizzy phoned her parents and suggested that they try their first Skype conversation so they could see Emma. Lillian and Tom had Skyped with Jane and her kids before, but they still didn't seem to have the hang of it. Lizzy tried for 45 minutes to guide them through it over the phone, her mother repeatedly asking, "Isn't this supposed to be a video call?" and "I can't see you! Can you see us? Can you hear me?" Finally they figured out that the camera plugged into Tom's ancient computer was broken. They decided to try again another time.

That first week, Lizzy and Will spent a lot of time staring at Emma, who was the most beautiful baby in the history of the world. They both talked a lot about how amazing it was that they had created this beautiful, wonderful, beautiful, incredible thing, this new beautiful, beautiful person, together. They carefully inventoried her body parts to see how she melded the two of them into one. She had Will's ears, and Lizzy's eyes, Will's fingers, Lizzy's nose. Or so it seemed at this early stage.

During Emma's second day at home, a visiting nurse came to the apartment to make sure everybody was OK. Apparently this was standard procedure at the hospital for first-time mothers. The nurse had a checklist—crib, check! Diapers, check! It was very basic stuff and Lizzy found it borderline insulting. But then she realized that of course there must be parents who didn't have any of these things, and truly weren't prepared, so it was a good idea for the nurse to ask (2).

Will held Emma often so Lizzy could rest, and changed diapers with some skill apparently acquired when Georgie was a baby. Lizzy struggled with the changes at first, especially cleaning off the foul, sticky black meconium the first few days, but she quickly got so much practice that diaper changes became routine. She had wondered if she'd feel grossed out by it all—so much poop, all the time!—but the frequency with which she had to deal with all these bodily secretions cured her of her squeamishness in a surprisingly short time.

Maybe this acceptance was also partly because Lizzy was confronting her own biological self in a new way, starting to have a different way of looking at her _own _body. While she sat on the sofa with Emma attached to her breast for hours every day, she really, truly understood for the first time in her life that she was a primate. Her breasts were practical, useful things, not things to worry about aesthetically—were they big enough, or high enough, or pretty enough? It didn't matter, if they were doing their job.

She and Will didn't talk about it directly, but she could see that Will was affected by the physicality of the experience, too. Before Emma was born, there had been times when he had seen her _in extremis_—in bed, experiencing pleasure. But now he had also seen her _in extremis_ in pain, in labor. He'd seen her when she was utterly physically vulnerable, every part of her out there for him to see, and he hadn't been, and wasn't now, repulsed. And strangely, she wasn't embarrassed, either. There was nothing left to hide anymore. Their relatively unchallenging life together as a couple had never exposed them to each other this way. It was pretty intense.

And speaking of intensity and biology, Lizzy had a lot of intense biological needs. She was starving, she was dizzy with exhaustion, she was bleeding, she was dripping and oozing, and she had aches and pains in weird places. Will went out a lot to buy all the humiliating things she needed _right away_, no time to have them delivered: cream for her hemorrhoids, pain relievers for everything that hurt, lanolin ointment for her nipples, pads for her lochia. Damn it, why hadn't anyone thought to mention that she'd basically have her period _for six weeks_ after Emma was born? Will also went out to get Lizzy her favorite takeout foods and grabbed meals from the hot table at the nearby organic market. Unfortunately she always had to leave off the hot sauce because it might get into her breast milk. Ugh.

Together, Lizzy and Will spent hours trying to find the Rosetta Stone, break the cipher, unlock the mystery that was Emma. What did that cry mean? Was that a happy sound? Why was she screaming? Could she really be hungry again so soon? Would she ever start sleeping like a normal person? What was that weird bump/rash/crust/fur/flaky stuff, just right there? Fortunately, it was all very, very fascinating, because otherwise it might have been disgusting.

Emma went through all of her new baby clothes in about five seconds and they couldn't wait for the laundry service to wash them or she'd be left naked for a week. After some investigation, together they discovered that deep in the bowels of the apartment, there was a little laundry area with a front-loading washing machine and a dryer. Lizzy didn't know how to use the washer because she'd never had a fancy front loader, and Will didn't know how to use it because he'd never used _any _kind of washing machine before.

"Never? Not even in college?" she asked, utterly dumbfounded.

"What? No. I sent my laundry out. What's the big deal?"

She shook her head and sighed.

They found the washer's instruction booklet and Will read it to Lizzy. Then he had to run down to the drugstore to get a new jug of laundry detergent because the one they had was so old that the liquid had all dried up. But even these mundane things were a fun new adventure because they were all part of welcoming Emma into their lives.

Will had emailed friends and family photos of Emma from his iPhone while they were still at the hospital, and the good wishes started rolling in.

"I'll have Ahmed send out birth announcements, OK?" he asked Lizzy, who was looking intently at Emma's perfect little toes.

"Huh? Oh, sure, whatever. You can choose." Yet another detail she would have let slide because it didn't interest her in the least.

"Well, do you want to have a formal portrait go with it, or an engraved card, or...?" He sounded like he knew exactly what he wanted but didn't want to reveal it, exactly.

Lizzy smiled at him, sure there must be some rule about this in his prep school etiquette book. "Oh, I know you'll pick the right one. I'll leave it in the capable hands of you two design mavens."

"OK, we'll just send him your personal contact list, then?" Will asked, pulling out his iPhone to get things done.

"Yeah, OK. And, uh...well, I hate to bring this up, but do you want to send one to Georgie?"

Will's happy smile dimmed considerably, and he put his iPhone back in his pocket. "Yeah...I'm not sure that would be a good idea, to re-initiate contact. But anyway, I don't know where she is right now," he said glumly.

Lizzy put Emma in his arms and leaned against him. She knew that a new little girl in his life could never make up for the loss of the first one, but it was worth a try, at least.

* * *

A long parade of pilgrims came to pay tribute to the new princess, bearing food and more gifts. Jane, Charlie, and the boys came to see Emma the very first weekend, and Jane drove all the way in from Westchester again later that week just to make sure everyone was doing OK. Lydia came by to meet Emma and to hang out during the day a couple of times. She could do that because she was a freelance graphic designer and she was between jobs.

Charlotte dropped in after work one day to meet Emma, but she couldn't stay long because she had to rush off and pick up Chloe from her family daycare. Will's cousin Richard also blew through on his way to something or other, bearing a giant teddy bear and takeout teriyaki and blinding Emma with his fluorescent floral tie. He promised to bring his wife Eleanor to see them soon. Aunt Maddie called and told them she would come as soon as she could.

It was tiring to have all these visitors in only one week, but it was also great. Lizzy was grateful for their help and for the chance to share her and Will's joy with their visitors. This first week and into the next, she had a hard time walking properly, and, even after the grossest bodily secretions of the first few days had mostly dried up, her body didn't feel quite right, like things weren't fitting back together the same way. And she supposed they weren't. For sure all the same bits were there, but in different places than before. But with so many people around to help her the first week, she did OK even though she didn't feel normal at all. Her village was really coming through for her.

* * *

After that magical first week, Will had to go back to work. WPD was still working on the big windpower deal with the Danes, and they had a lead on something interesting in Hong Kong. There was no way around it, he had to get back to the office. They needed him.

His first day back at work, Will was really excited for Lizzy and Emma to come to WPD's offices so that everybody could meet the baby. So they all rode down to the Midtown building in the car that picked him up every morning, Emma howling in the fancy car seat, and then headed up to his office on the top floor. From her car seat, now safely installed in the fancy stroller, Emma continued howling in the elevator all the way to the top. Lizzy had been up for a couple of hours with Emma in the middle of the night and she knew she looked like crap, but she figured that the folks at the office probably weren't going to give her a second look anyway in the face of all that deafening splendor. She took Emma out of the car seat and held her, and that quieted her down.

And of course Lizzy was right that they only had eyes for Emma. Ahmed gushed, "So this is the little one we've been hearing so much about! She's beautiful! Can I hold her?"

They passed Emma around, first to Ahmed and then to Giovanna, Will's staff assistant, who left a big red lipstick kiss on her forehead. Then it was on to Carmen the executive VP, Dan the CFO, and Monica the CTO. The rest of the floor soon emptied as everyone squeezed into Will's office suite to get a look at Emma and to pat or pet or tickle whatever part of her they could reach.

Soon Emma got overwhelmed by this flood of attention and started to cry, naturally, so Will laughed and said the show was over for now. He and Lizzy went into his office, where she sat on the leather sofa and nursed Emma while Will gazed contentedly at them.

A couple of minutes later, there was a knock on the door and Ahmed stuck his head around it saying, "Will? Oh, sorry..." as he flushed bright red and quickly withdrew. Lizzy guessed he didn't really want to see his boss's wife's boob.

"Sorry, Ahmed, sorry. Just a second—" Lizzy called as she dug around in the diaper bag and pulled out the nursing cape for its inaugural use. She covered up and Will let Ahmed know he could come back in.

"Sorry," he said. "I just wondered if you needed anything."

Lizzy smiled. "No, thanks, we're fine. But I did want to thank you for the basket with the chocolate-covered fruit last week. It was just what the doctor ordered. And the photos look fantastic."

She nodded toward Will's desk where there was a row of eight pictures of Emma in various poses: on the scale in the delivery room just a few minutes old; swaddled in a pink-, blue- and white-striped hospital blanket and wearing a little stocking cap, squinting; looking at the camera from Lizzy's arms with her big, unseeing blue-grey baby eyes. It wasn't like she had done anything very exciting in her first week of life. Will had emailed the pictures to Ahmed on Friday, with specific instructions about framing. They were very large photos, and Lizzy imagined visitors standing up to peer over them in order to see Will when he was behind his desk.

Will smiled. "Yeah, I guess I went a little overboard there, but they were all so perfect."

"Well, please let me know if I can help. You know, we just _love _babies in this office." Ahmed headed back to his office.

By way of explanation, Will said, "He and Phil are trying to adopt. Hope it works out this time."

"Yeah. They'll be great dads," nodded Lizzy. She pushed back the cape and they watched Emma nurse, eyes closed, little hand on Lizzy's big, round breast.

Will tickled Emma's foot and said, "Emma, this will all be yours someday. I'll teach you everything there is to know about wind turbines, and photovoltaic cells, and wave energy technology. And all about the economics of renewable energy."

"Oh, great," laughed Lizzy. "No pressure. Don't listen to him, Emma. You can be whatever you want when you grow up. Right, Will?" She nudged him. His own father had pushed him really hard to take over the family business, and he had done so, albeit not very happily.

"Yeah, that's right. Find your own path, Emma. The sky's the limit," he said wryly.

Lizzy snickered. "OK, but let's start with the basics. First, let's get a handle on this sleeping thing. After that, we'll work on the foundations of bowel control. Pee-yew."

So the designer leather sofa got its inaugural diaper-changing use that day, too. Lizzy threw the portable changing pad down on the cushion and unsnapped the legs of Emma's romper while Will got out the diaper and the wipes. It was a big disgusting blow-out, poo stretching up nearly to Emma's little umbilical cord stub.

"Oh, look, sweetie. Our love made manifest, just like we said," Lizzy joked.

* * *

That week, with Will back at work, the new family tried to settle into a new routine. Since Will was gone all day, Lizzy was now on her own, trying not to break the baby. All the help she'd had the previous week dried up. Lydia got a new client who needed a big design project finished ASAP, so she had to stop coming over. Jane made a mid-week trip from Westchester, but the 60-minute drive was just too long for her to do all the time, and besides it was disruptive for her and her boys. It was still out of the question for Lillian to come visit, and Mary hadn't even acknowledged the birth announcement. There wasn't anybody on Will's side of the family to help, either. All of Lizzy's friends were at work during the day, and to a woman they were so busy that there was no way she could ask them to take time off to give her a hand. So much for her village, apparently. Anyway, Lizzy thought, she was resourceful, and she'd figure out a way to cope.

She wished Emma had come with a proper instruction manual, though. The closest thing Lizzy had to one was the two baby books Jane had recommended to her, each with a very different style. One was very touchy-feely and suggested natural remedies for things and made a point of telling you when you needed to worry and when you didn't. The other read like it was written for medical professionals; it was all business, nothing about feelings at all, just the facts. The problem was that Emma didn't always behave the way either of the books said she would. So in that sense the baby books were both like instruction manuals for a slightly different model of baby from the one she had.

Lizzy phoned Jane, her chief baby consultant, with a lot questions, but she tried not to call too often because, after all, Jane had her own babies to take care of. She had other friends to call when she didn't know what to do—Charlotte and Vanessa among them—as well as Aunt Maddie, and she did ask them for advice, too. Sometimes they agreed, and sometimes they didn't, but, like the baby books, they all had very strong opinions on the care and feeding of the baby. It was a little perplexing, so mostly she relied on Jane's suggestions because at least she had scientific studies instead of just magical thinking to back up her claims.

On the one hand, Lizzy thought, Emma was perfect in every imaginable way. Not only was she smart, beautiful, and strong, but she was a real champ at doing what a newborn was supposed to do, according to the book: she cried, pooped, peed, and nursed. Constantly.

However, on the other hand, one thing that Emma did _not _do the way the books described was sleep.

During the day, she would fall asleep when she nursed, which was every two hours for half an hour. She'd sleep for about 15 minutes, and then be awake till her next nursing. If Lizzy tried to move her from the nursing pillow to her crib, she would wake up and cry. Jane had said all the research showed that getting infants to follow routines was really important, so Lizzy tried to put Emma down for naps three times a day at exactly the same time. But Emma wouldn't sleep when she was in her crib. This was an interesting puzzle. Lizzy decided to let her sleep on the nursing pillow on her lap and to hold very, very still while Emma slept. Lizzy played with her iPhone in the meantime, surfing the web looking for information on infant behavior.

During the hour and 15 minute increments that Emma was awake, Lizzy changed her diaper, lay together with her on the carpet in the living room floor, looked at black-and-white picture books, and did educational activities that the baby book suggested. When Will came home at 7 or 8 o'clock every evening, he got the full poop report, and he took it all in with great interest.

At night, Emma would sleep a little longer at a time, but she still woke up, like clockwork, every two hours, to nurse. And she only slept from 10 to 6. Weren't babies supposed to sleep 10 or 12 hours a night? That was one of the few things both books agreed on.

Will had never been a morning person; Lizzy was well aware of that. It turned out that he was not a middle-of-the-night person, either. Once he was asleep, he just didn't wake up. So every time Emma woke up and cried during the night, Will's sleep was disturbed, yes, but he didn't wake up enough to do anything about the crying. It was left to Lizzy to get up, drag herself to Emma's room, nurse her in the rocking chair, put her back in the crib, and slump back to bed. This had been difficult the first week, but Lizzy had persisted because one of the baby books and Jane both said that it was important for the parents to have their own separate space. As the second week wore on, the situation became more and more intolerable. Lizzy couldn't see why the baby had to be in a separate room, so she got Will to roll the crib into their bedroom. That way at least she didn't have to leave the bedroom in the middle of the night.

At the end of the week when Lizzy took her to the doctor for a well baby appointment, she asked about the sleep thing, urgently. The doctor checked Emma out and said there was nothing wrong with her. No colic, no acid reflux, nothing. Babies just did this sometimes, she said.

Lizzy called Jane, her outside consultant, who also told her that this was "within the range of normal behavior for a newborn." Great.

She asked Jane, "What do you do when your boys don't sleep?"

Jane said, "No, Aiden. Don't put your finger in there. What? Oh, no. We actually have the opposite problem, which is that the boys sleep too much sometimes. It's really inconvenient—I can hardly get out the door some days because they just keep on sleeping. Isn't that ironic?" She laughed.

Lizzy didn't think it was funny or ironic at all, actually.

* * *

During Emma's third week, the sleep issues were really starting to wear Lizzy and Will down, although Emma of course seemed just fine. Will was dragging, even though he didn't actually get up during the night, and it was even harder than usual for him to get up in the morning.

"Why don't you just go sleep in the guest room?" Lizzy asked. "You don't get up during the night anyway, and I don't have anywhere to be in the morning. I can take the hit for the team this time. The doctor says she'll grow out of it. It's just for now."

"Are you sure?" Will asked. "I want to do my part."

"Oh, yeah. There's no reason for both of us to be basket cases," Lizzy reassured him.

So Will started sleeping in the guest room, at first just on nights when he had a big meeting or something important planned at work the next day. That way he could be semi-coherent at the office. As time went on, he started sleeping in the guest room all the time so that he could function at work.

Lizzy had never slept very much before Emma was born. She was used to sleeping from midnight or one until 6:30 a lot of the time. But she was also used to sleeping straight through, and deeply, during those five or six hours. This was different. She wasn't getting any REM sleep at all—hadn't had a dream since Emma was born. As Charlotte said when she came to visit one evening, if someone treated prisoners of war like this, waking them up every couple of hours, they'd be in violation of the Geneva Convention and get arrested for war crimes.

After three nearly weeks of this, Lizzy was sure she was starting to slide into sleep deprivation-induced psychosis. One morning at breakfast, Will held Emma, feeling pretty fresh from having slept in the guest room. Meanwhile, Lizzy slumped over her cornflakes, haggard, with dark circles under her eyes. He asked, "How are you doing? Can you keep this up?"

She groaned and said, "I don't really know what else I can do..."

Will said, "Do you want to hire someone to take Emma at night? What do you call it, a night nanny or something?"

Lizzy glared at him. "Are you serious? Pay someone to stay up all night with our baby?"

"Well, it's an obvious solution, right?"

"Sure, if you think it's OK to pay someone to carry out your most intimate biological functions. Can I hire someone to pee for me in the middle of the night, so I don't have to get up to do it myself, too? Anyway, I'm not sure if she'll take a bottle. She refused it the one time I tried when my nipples hurt too much from her chewing on them."

Will shrugged. "OK, your call."

Finally, Lizzy determined that the only way she would survive this inhuman treatment was to abandon the crib and plop Emma down in the middle of her and Will's California King bed. That way when she woke up to nurse in the middle of the night, Lizzy didn't have to get up, and could just give her the boob and go back to sleep, too. Lizzy also started putting Emma to bed for the night by lying down with her at 10 o'clock to nurse in bed and then falling asleep with her.

Co-sleeping was also cozy and nice. It had its disadvantages, though, most of them involving Emma's incredible ability to take up the entire bed and to wake Lizzy with all her wiggling, snoring, and kicking. Plus, one of the baby books put co-sleeping high on the list of "top ten things you must never do if your baby is to survive to adulthood." The other book had it as number one on the list of "top ten things you must do to bond properly with your baby."

Around this same time, Emma started really throwing a fit when Lizzy tried to put her down during the day. Papasan swing: no. Crib: no. Blanket on the floor: _no_. Stroller: no, no! Car seat: never! She wanted to be held all the time.

Lizzy called Jane and asked what she should do. "Oh!" said Jane. "She's a high-need baby. That's challenging, but normal. It all fits in with the sleep issues, too. Psychologists think those things are related. She just needs lots of touching and holding, loads of love. You'll be all right."

"So basically you're saying I have to superglue her to my body."

"Well, I wouldn't say that, no..." Jane prevaricated. Actually that was pretty much exactly what she meant, Lizzy found, when she read about "high-need" babies on the Internet. They couldn't be serious, right?

It took Lizzy a while to give up on the idea of taking Emma out for long walks in the stroller, but she did, because the stroller just made Emma madder. She put away the papasan swing, and the baby bouncer, and all the other gizmos Jane had told her she needed to get. After trying everything else in her baby gear arsenal—various slings, a few different kinds of baby wraps, a different stroller—Lizzy reluctantly pulled out the awful, plain, navy blue Baby Bjorn baby carrier with the shiny reflective strips on it. She had to stare at the instructions for a while before she could figure out exactly how to put it on and where to put Emma inside it—it was complicated, and she was really, really tired. But after wrestling with it for about ten minutes, she got Emma in there, cuddled face-in right up to her chest, and suddenly it was quiet. At last, silence.

From then on, the fancy stroller sat unused in the closet. She bought a $10 little foldup umbrella stroller at the drugstore on the corner and threw the fancy diaper bag into it whenever they went out, pushing it along like a little phantom baby while Emma was safe in the baby carrier. The waterproof pads and the huge stack of cloths also got a quite a workout due to Emma's leaky cloth diapers, while the beautiful, sparkly, useless baby things from the baby registry gathered dust. And Lizzy started wearing Emma on her chest pretty much all the time, inside and outside of the house.

Maybe it was because Emma was feeling more secure, but after a week of this she started napping better, or in a way that Lizzy could live with, at least. At 9 o'clock and 1 o'clock, with Emma still in the baby carrier on Lizzy's tummy, Lizzy flopped down on her back on the bed or the sofa. She could doze lightly sometimes during these naps, cries of "Sleep when the baby sleeps!" echoing in her ears. Which of course was basically never. But fortunately, Emma—then and only then—slept like a log for at least an hour.

This seemed more manageable to Lizzy, as if things were starting to turn a corner. They began to venture out more for short trips during the day, to the park, to cafés, and to bookstores. She was tired, but she knew it wouldn't last forever. Emma would outgrow this. Besides, there were only five more weeks of maternity leave, five more weeks of bonding with the baby, so she should try to treasure it all, get as much of it in as she could while she could.

Friends and co-workers continued to make short visits in the evenings after work, bringing food and conversation, and that was nice and kept her sane. Elena came by to meet Emma, and Lizzy was pleased to see that Elena was just as warm and delightful and loving with the baby as it had seemed she would be in her interviews. That weekend Aunt Maddie and Uncle Ed and their girls, Hannah and Sadie, came to meet Emma. They all properly pay court to the little princess, and everyone had a wonderful time.

* * *

The fourth week of Emma's life, something really catastrophic happened that, for Lizzy, put her struggles with sleep and new baby-ness more generally into some much-needed perspective.

It was Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York City on October 30. The forecasts were bad enough that Will even stayed home from work, and it was a good thing, too. Lizzy and Will and Emma huddled together in their apartment and looked out as the trees in Central Park whipped around, cracked, and broke off. Trash cans and various other different kinds of urban debris crashed frenziedly down the street for hours. A few hardy, risk-loving souls stepped outside, mostly to take their stir-crazy dogs out for just a minute, before rushing quickly back inside. The windows shook and the rain pounded down. It was like watching the end of the world from a skybox in Yankee Stadium.

Of course, nothing really terrible happened to them safe in their Uptown cocoon. All around them, in fact all up and down the coast, the devastation was terrible—downed power lines, flooding, destroyed homes and cars, trains and traffic halted, deaths—but not in their little island of privilege. Instead, all the destruction was concentrated in the parts of the city that could least cope with it: Downtown, the housing projects on the water...It was all just too awful for words. What was a little sleep deprivation compared to that?

After the storm was over, Lizzy was desperate to go check out her old Downtown neighborhood. She had heard that there was no power up to 39th Street in the days (and, eventually, weeks) after Sandy, and that her old neighborhood was blacked out and wrecked. In _The Times_ she saw a story featuring one of her former neighbors. He was one of the hipsters hanging out in the evenings at a Chase ATM to charge his phone and get internet service. She didn't know if it would really be a good idea for her to go Downtown with Emma, or how she'd even get there with the trains stopped and traffic so bad and who knows what sewage and stuff all over the streets. So she stayed home, and sent the Red Cross a huge boatload of money, which was all she really could do. She felt helpless.

Hurricane Sandy worried her a lot. It made her think about all the crazy things that could happen in life, things you would never predict, things you couldn't possibly control. Who would have thought that New York City would be totally demolished by a _hurricane_, of all things? As if September 11 hadn't been enough. How could she keep her baby safe, when the world was such a dangerous and unpredictable place? That week she sat and held onto Emma a lot, kissing her head and thinking that she would never let Emma move away from home. Ever. College? Forget about it! At least she still had four more weeks of maternity leave.

* * *

By week five, even though the sleeping situation was a lot better than before, it was starting to wear on Lizzy more and more each day. For a while she put off doing anything more about it because, after all, what was it to the problems other people were facing out there right now? And travel around the city was still pretty tough.

But finally she couldn't stand it anymore. She knew things were dire when she fell asleep at 10 o'clock on election day before the presidential race was even decided, instead of staying up late to watch the returns come in. Will was worried, too, and so they decided to insist that their pediatrician, Dr. Garcia, give them a referral to a specialist at the pediatric sleep center in one of the big hospitals. This one, fortunately, had had its generator higher up in the building, so it hadn't lost power during Hurricane Sandy.

The doctor ran a bunch of tests, electrodes bristling from Emma's poor little fuzzy head, and concluded that, in short, there was nothing wrong with her. She didn't have apnea or any other sleep disorder. It was just a developmental thing, and she would grow out of it. Lizzy and Will would have to adapt and live with it for now, the doctor said. Basically, even though Lizzy couldn't possibly stand it anymore, she had to keep on standing it.

Lizzy was both relieved and unhappy to find out that there was nothing wrong with Emma. She was relieved because in the children's wing of the hospital she had seen a lot of really sick kids, and she knew how very, very lucky she and Will were that Emma was healthy and developmentally typical. But of course she was unhappy that "nothing wrong" apparently meant that there was absolutely nothing she could do about this intolerable situation.

Naturally Lizzy refused to go down without a fight. She ordered every book on Amazon about babies and sleep, and read them while Emma was busy not sleeping. All of them said not to try their techniques until the baby was more than four months old, so that was no use.

She consulted with Jane and Aunt Maddie, and got tips from them and from the Internet on what might help Emma sleep more at night and during the day: soothing music, darkened rooms, baby massage, aromatherapy. Sorry, she was not going to try acupuncture on a baby. But nothing worked.

As she did with most things eventually, of course she also called Charlotte for a reality check. Charlotte was at work and was a little distracted, but she still tried to answer Lizzy's question.

"She still isn't sleeping, huh? Yeah, Chloe did that for a while. She wouldn't go to sleep and we'd stay up half the night singing her 'A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall' over and over again. I don't know, sometimes babies are just like that. You got her checked out, right?"

"Yeah, nothing's wrong, apparently. So what did you do? I've got to get some sleep."

"Umm...I probably shouldn't admit this, but basically...we used mommy's little helper, Benadryl." Lizzy could hear Charlotte's keyboard clicking as she talked.

"What? You gave your kid _drugs_?"

"No, no, it's perfectly safe. It's an antihistamine. Cures whatever ails you. Well, I guess she was a little older, too."

"I can't believe you did that." Lizzy was aghast. It said very clearly in all the books as well as on the bottle that you weren't supposed to give Benadryl to kids under age six years.

"Oh, come on. Nobody will admit it, but everybody uses it. Maybe not Jane. But it's like co-sleeping. I bet you 75% of people co-sleep with their babies, but they all claim they don't because you're not supposed to do it. All parents have dirty little secrets like that."

"But..." spluttered Lizzy, unwilling to admit that she and Emma were co-sleeping.

"Well, you asked." Lizzy could practically hear Charlotte shrugging over the phone. "I guess you'll just have to live with it for a while, if you're not willing to use the magic potion."

So Lizzy hunkered down and continued to live with it, feeling like she was living underwater, and sinking lower and lower into the briny depths.

Even in her fog, though, she knew it was important for them to get out and do stuff. Going out was tricky to plan because of the napping and feeding schedule, but Lizzy and Emma took forays to the bookstore, and to Emma's interminable number of well-baby checkups. There was a fun new specialty tea place a couple of blocks away and they went there for herbal tea breaks so she wouldn't be tempted by the super-caffeinated coffee at Starbucks. They even attended a new moms' group at a community center a few blocks away. She'd found it completely by chance when she saw a flyer on a telephone pole outside the center. That was kind of nice, commiserating with other new moms about feeding, sleeping, pooping and crying, and how their babies did too much or too little of each.

At home, Lizzy found herself doing loads and loads of laundry that required immediate attention, too urgently to wait for the laundry service. For a while, she tried to cook without catching the baby carrier on fire. But finally she gave up on that and either ate delivery or just made turkey sandwiches from groceries delivered from the market.

By this time, Lizzy and Emma had started hanging out mostly in the gigantic white living room, the biggest and brightest room in the apartment. It had ceased to look so much like a mausoleum and started to look more like a Jackson Pollock canvas: white with splashes of bright color randomly flung all over the place. The rainbow-striped baby gym lay on the carpet next to the coffee table, and the sea-foam green changing table from Emma's bedroom sat in the corner by the fireplace, clashing with the fancy white cloisonné vases on the mantelpiece. Piles of Emma's clothes were stacked up on the Danish modern chair next to the changing table, and piles of washcloths for wiping up messes sat on the side table for ease of use. Occasionally Lizzy found a little sock hanging from a lamp or some other unlikely place, and had no idea how it had gotten there. Three mornings a week she rushed to pick everything up so that the cleaners would have some clear surfaces to vacuum and dust after she and Emma had scurried out of the apartment to get out of their way. But five minutes after the cleaners left, it somehow already looked like a baby bomb had just gone off.

Will came home late several nights that week because of the Hong Kong deal. WPD was in an intense investigation phase, trying to get more information about the firm they were thinking about investing in there. Because of the 12-hour time difference between New York and Hong Kong, the only opportunity to talk on the phone was at 9 o'clock at night, 8 o'clock if the Hong Kong folks came to the office early. One night he even got home after Lizzy and Emma had already fallen asleep, so they didn't see him at all.

* * *

That Saturday morning while Will was off playing squash, Vanessa, her friend from the women lawyers support group, came over with her little girl, who was now 10 months old. Lizzy looked at her with new eyes because now she knew this was what Emma would be like in only a few months. Baby Tory was interested in the books and mementos scattered around the living room, and Lizzy realized they would need to babyproof the place soon. While Lizzy and Vanessa sat on the sofa, Tory was crawling around really fast, pulling up and cruising around the edge of the coffee table, looking ready to walk at any second. She had bright dark eyes like her mom's, and Lizzy could tell she was going to be a smart one, also like her mom.

Lizzy chuckled, handing Emma over to Vanessa, "So, there is some hope that one day Emma will do more than lie here like a log."

Vanessa laughed, too. "Yeah, faster than you realize. And then you'll wish she'd just sit still for once. I'm dreading the day she starts to walk." She paused, looking up from Emma. "Are you doing OK? You look tired."

"Yeah, it's a little rough right now. The first five weeks have been difficult. No sleep."

Vanessa nodded sympathetically. "Nothing serious, though?"

"No, the docs say we just have to wait till she grows out of it. Anyway, how are you? You look good. I love your new do." Vanessa had previously straightened her hair and worn it Michelle Obama-style, but now she was wearing it really short, clipped close to her head. It looked dramatic and fabulous.

Vanessa smiled. "Yeah, it's a lot easier to take care of this way. No time to go to the hair salon anyway. Plus, I just sort of decided to let it all hang out at work. Yes, I'm a mom. Yes, I'm Black. Deal with it."

"How's it going? Are they giving you a hard time?" Lizzy asked. Vanessa was trying to make partner at one of the big New York litigation firms. She had been in the top ten in her class at Yale Law School, clerked for a Federal Appeals Court judge, and then been heavily recruited by the BigLaw firms. She was destined for great things.

"No, it's not all bad. Actually that was one of the things I wanted to tell you. Do you remember the firm got sued after Mona Berg didn't make partner, like, ten years ago?"

Lizzy nodded. "Yeah, they said she was too 'animated' or something, right? God forbid a woman should talk too much."

"Yeah, and then she sued them for sex discrimination and won. So they finally hired more women, but nobody could last in that environment for very long. Now the partners are desperate to retain women, and they finally put some new family-friendly policies in place. They just started offering a part-time track to partnership. And I decided to try it out. I'm the first one at the firm."

"Wow! How is it so far?"

"So far so good, I think. I'm working half time, _only _40 hours a week," Vanessa smiled ironically. "I just started a few weeks ago, but I'm much happier. Basically, before, I never saw Tory. I handed her off to the nanny first thing in the morning and came home after she was asleep. Michael is still doing that, actually. We had a babysitter for the weekends, too. I just thought, what's the point? Why have kids if you're never going to see them?"

"How are you feeling about it? Are you worried about what it might mean for your career?" Lizzy asked, thinking back on the conversations she'd had with the support group so many times. Paula wouldn't be happy.

Vanessa handed Emma, who had started to fuss a little, back to Lizzy. "Yeah, I guess I'm worried. But I just couldn't live like that anymore. We'll see whether I can live like _this_, either."

"Yeah," nodded Lizzy. "Yeah." She realized she needed to start getting her head around going back to work. At least she still had three more weeks of maternity leave. Wait, only three more weeks?

* * *

Lizzy had taken Emma down to her office the week after she was born, and everyone had been suitably impressed by Emma's beauty and prowess at being a baby. Gina, her staff assistant, had squealed and jumped up and down, and Kyle, her second-in-command, had asked if he could take a cellphone picture to send to his wife, who just loved babies.

After that visit, they had left her alone for one entire week. Then the phone calls had started. They had questions about the location of important files, or who to call about particular issues, or if she could make a call for them to one of her contacts. This hadn't been too much of a bother at first, but gradually it had become more difficult as her sleep deficit had grown.

Kyle called her with a question about an ongoing case when Emma was about five weeks old. He wanted to know where some documents were. Maybe she had them on her laptop.

"Ummm..." she blithered. She knew she should know where they were, but she just couldn't remember anything anymore. Was this what they meant by 'baby brain'? She hoped it would get better soon. She dug around on her laptop for a while before emailing Kyle that she didn't have what he was looking for. Maybe he could find a hard copy in her filing cabinet.

After about five conversations like that, the phone calls had stopped coming. If Lizzy had been less tired, she might have missed work more, but as it was she hardly noticed.

* * *

Six weeks after Emma was born, Lizzy went to see her OB/Gyn, Dr. Dasgupta, for her own final post-natal checkup. While Emma sat in her car seat on the floor and screamed until her face turned purple, Dr. Dasgupta asked how Lizzy was doing. She said it was normal to feel tired, was satisfied that the lochia had finally stopped, and had her get up in the stirrups for one last pony ride. After Lizzy got dressed again, the doctor came back into the exam room ready for a very serious discussion. She asked what method of birth control Lizzy and her husband planned to use now.

After Lizzy had stopped laughing, and then had checked to make sure that her pad had done its job, she said, "Well...we're already using two excellent methods. Sleep deprivation, and co-sleeping with Emma." She hadn't meant to reveal the co-sleeping part, but the doctor didn't seem to be worried about that.

Dr. Dasgupta turned to hand her a flyer about Kegel exercises, and then reminded her she couldn't use anything hormonal until she stopped nursing. She ticked off the long list of forbidden methods: the ring, the pill, the patch, the injection, the implant...basically anything Lizzy had ever seriously considered using.

"So what you're saying is that I can use...?"

"An IUD or barrier method. Diaphragm, cervical cap, or condoms and foam."

Holy crap. Back to condoms after all this time? Not that it was all that relevant at the moment. Lizzy decided on an IUD and made an appointment to have it inserted. This was not the time to take any unnecessary risks.

That evening over dinner, Lizzy told Will that Dr. Dasgupta had told her it was OK for them to have sex again now. They both laughed until their sides hurt.

Then Will stopped laughing and asked, "Wait, do you want to?"

Lizzy skewered him with a glance and said, "What, are you out of your freaking mind?"

He didn't ask again after that.

* * *

Oh, my God! Only two more weeks of maternity leave left!

By the start of the seventh week of her maternity leave, Lizzy knew she had to get serious about going back to work. But she was starting to have some unexpected nerves about it. Some of her worries seemed kind of normal to her, and based on what she heard from her friends and the women at the mother's group, she thought they were probably pretty common. Emma had just started smiling and interacting a little instead of lying around with an unfocused look in her blank blue-grey eyes and making those weird alien newborn faces. All the hours of hard work might begin to pay off. Emma wouldn't always be an unresponsive little lump—she would be a real little person! How could she leave her now? Especially not in the hands of some stranger. Even a background-checked, expert-with-babies, highly recommended, kind, caring stranger who had now come to see Emma several times, and whom Emma seemed to like just fine.

And that was where her concerns might be starting to get a little weird, she thought. As much as she was missing her job—and she was, every time she saw something in _The Times_ about an interesting legal case—the hurricane, and the sick kids she'd seen in the hospital, and all of life's other uncertainties made her feel like it wasn't totally safe to let go.

When she tried to think all of this through logically, she just couldn't do it. And that was the last thing that had her really worried about going back to work. Lizzy's brain was still really, really...what was the word for it?...not sharp. Emma was sleeping better than before, but all the weeks of extreme sleep deprivation had left Lizzy unable to form a complete sentence some days. And it seemed to be getting worse, not better, as time went by.

Kyle called her that Monday, excited that she'd be back soon and thinking about how to start handing some things back to her.

"So, that's where we are on the Al-Harazi case. What do you think? Do you want to keep going in that direction?" He paused eagerly, waiting for her evaluation.

Lizzy replied, "Uh..." and realized that she had kind of dozed off in the middle of what he'd been saying. She had no idea what he was talking about or what the right thing to do was. "Yeah, that sounds great. Good work," she finally said.

After that conversation, Lizzy decided to test her mental acuity by attempting the Monday_ New York Times_ crossword puzzle as Emma was nursing before her morning nap. She did OK with Monday, the piece-of-cake, ease-yourself-back-into-the-workweek puzzle. So she decided to up the ante by pulling out her stack of old puzzles, ones she'd been saving for a rainy day, and giving Tuesday and Wednesday a whirl. Tuesday went fine. With Wednesday, though, she hit a wall.

Try as she might, she could not remember a three-letter word, starting with an O, for a crumb or small piece of food. Oat? No, but close. Ogre? That was four letters and also wrong wrong wrong. This was not good. She needed to be at the top of her game to do her job. How could she go back to work if she was this discombobulated? What was she going to do?

She called Charlotte to see if they could talk. Fortunately, Charlotte had half an hour to meet for coffee during the afternoon, so Lizzy took the subway down to a midtown coffee shop near Charlotte's office. Will always wanted her to take the town car when she went out with Emma, but Lizzy preferred to take the subway when it was possible because Emma screamed so much in the car seat. She didn't lie about it to Will, but she figured that what he didn't know wouldn't hurt him.

Emma seemed interested in watching the flashing light and dark in the subway tunnels and stations as she rode on Lizzy's chest. Of course nobody gave up their seat to Lizzy. This was New York, after all.

As Lizzy stepped out onto the platform, an older lady with blue hair put her hand on Lizzy's arm and said, "You really shouldn't take him on the subway, dear. This damp air isn't good for baby's little lungs."

"Yeah, OK," said Lizzy, giving her a suspicious look.

Charlotte had just turned the corner and was approaching quickly as Lizzy reached the door to the coffee shop.

Lizzy said by way of greeting, "Hey, just got some free advice about how to raise my kid from a little old lady on the subway. A New Yorker looking out for her neighbor! How about that?"

"I know! Isn't it amazing? There's nothing like a baby to get a New Yorker to open up."

After they had sat down at a table and given the waitress their order, Charlotte pulled her wobbly old chair over closer so she could get a good look at Emma. Lizzy quickly shoved back from the table a little to keep Emma from knocking over their cups. Emma wiggled and waved and cooed at Charlotte.

"Char, I can't believe you went back to work after only six weeks of maternity leave. Here I am at seven weeks, and I still feel like I can't walk right. You are Superwoman!"

Charlotte took Emma's hand and calmly said, "Lizzy, I told you why I did that."

"You did?" asked Lizzy, surprised. She didn't remember it at all.

Just then the waitress came back with their drinks, a huge coffee for Charlotte and mint tea for Lizzy, who still wasn't allowed to have caffeine. She looked on enviously as Charlotte poured milk into her coffee from a little metal pitcher and tore open a couple of sugar packets.

"Yes, I did," Charlotte continued, "I had to go back to work right away because I didn't get paid maternity leave, and I only had two weeks of sick time plus two weeks of vacation days. We couldn't afford for me to take any more time off, especially since I earn more than Liam does. And he couldn't take paternity leave because his company's policy said it would have to start right when the baby was born, but that was when _I _had leave. We couldn't afford for him to take unpaid leave, either, because we wouldn't have been able to make the mortgage payment. Then it was practically impossible to find daycare for Chloe because she was so young."

"Oh, my God, Char! That is just...inhumane. I am so sorry."

"It was horrible. Oh, well, I guess I shouldn't complain—aren't there some cultures where women are out working in the fields the next day?"

Lizzy nodded, "Yeah, and there are others where you're hardly allowed to get out of bed for the next, like, year. It doesn't make it any better."

Charlotte poked her coffee with a wooden stirrer for a few moments. "Well, it's possible I didn't tell you the whole story about why I went back," she admitted.

"Oh, Char, why not?"

"The money thing, of course." The money thing came between them in lots of ways now, even though they never talked about it. Or maybe exactly _because _they never talked about it.

Things had been tough for Charlotte's family since the financial crash in 2008. Her parents had made a lot of money when they had sold their family company, Lucas Safe & Lock, to Will's company in 2006. But they had foolishly invested most of it with a friend of a friend, a guy who claimed they could get a massive return really fast. His name was Bernie Madoff. Thanks to that decision, they had lost just about everything. Now they were struggling to keep afloat during their retirement, relying on their small remaining nest egg. Charlotte and Liam, who had benefited a little from her parents' financial windfall initially in the form of some help with their down payment, now couldn't count on any help from them at all.

Lizzy and Will, on the other hand, basically had no financial limits. The crash had affected them, too, but only in the sense that Will's, er, _their_, net worth had fallen from eleventy-_seventeen_ hundred gazillion dollars to eleventy-_five_ hundred gazillion dollars or something like that. The asymmetry made things very uncomfortable between Lizzy and Charlotte sometimes.

"Char, it's also possible you did tell me and I just didn't understand what a big deal it was. Four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks—before Emma, it probably would have sounded all the same to me."

Charlotte shrugged. "Maybe. I don't really know anymore. I'm so tired that I can't remember a damn thing."

"I know the feeling," Lizzy laughed. "My short-term memory is totally shot."

"Well, anyway, thanks. How are you doing? Isn't your maternity leave about up?"

"Yeah, I'm supposed to go back week after next. Wednesday we're heading to Artemis to see my parents for Thanksgiving. Just one more week of leave after that." She wiped some tea off of the front of the baby carrier holding Emma to her chest. Fortunately the tea had bypassed Emma's head, but anyway it was tepid by now. No harm, no foul.

"Supposed to?" Charlotte never missed a thing. "You mean you might not go back?"

"No, I'm going back. It's all set. Got a nanny ready to go and everything."

"Do I hear a big 'but' in there somewhere?"

"There's a big 'butt' right here, dahling," Lizzy pointed to herself.

"Come on, answer the question."

"No, I'm definitely going back. You know what that job means to me. The idea is starting to freak me out a little bit, though. The practicalities of it." Lizzy looked down at her tea and grabbed Emma's flailing hand as it came close to the cup.

"Yeah, I know. Well, I can talk you through it if you want. Do you have a pump yet? All that stuff?"

Lizzy nodded. "Pump, check. Other stuff, not yet."

"Time to get a move on, then!"

"Yeah, great, I'm going to have to buy a whole new wardrobe," Lizzy said, making a face.

Charlotte got a funny pinched look. Lizzy realized she had put her foot in it again when she mentioned buying clothes. Damn money.

"Well," said Charlotte brightly, "will you look at the time? Back to work. Check!" she called.

"You go on ahead if you're worried about being late, Charlotte. I'll get it this time."

"Not a chance, Bennet. Halvsies."

When the waitress, an older woman with some kind of Eastern European accent, came over to deliver the check, she said, "You know, you really should not carry baby around all the time like that. You will spoil him. Too much holding is bad thing."

When Lizzy returned home, she discovered that she had locked herself out of the apartment. She had to ask David, the doorman, to let her in.

When Will came home from work that evening around 8 o'clock, they sat down to eat takeout pasta for dinner. He had picked it up on his way home because Emma had had a rough afternoon and Lizzy was too tired even to order delivery. She nursed Emma while she tried not very successfully to eat with her left hand.

"How are you doing? Did you two have a good day today?" Will asked as he let Emma make a little fist around his big index finger.

"Yeah, about the same as yesterday. Poop, pee, nurse, nap, poop, pee, nurse, nap, repeat _ad nauseum_. Oh, and I had coffee with Charlotte."

"Sounds thrilling," he laughed. "Glad you got to see Charlotte. It might be good for you to get out more, talk to some adults." He looked at her more closely. "Is everything OK?"

"Yeah. Well, sort of _meh_, actually."

"OK, what's going on?"

"Earlier today I was sitting in the living room nursing Emma, and I started to think about how I would have to pump at work, and how I would manage that, and whether I could really think through a complicated legal case the way I'm feeling right now, and I completely freaked out."

"What do you mean? Is pumping really that hard? I mean that seriously, I just don't know what it's like."

"No...I guess that's not really it. It's mostly the thinking thing. And also, it's just...it's really hard to think about leaving her. I mean, I love my job, and I'm really looking forward to going back, but I also have this incredible, uncontrollable urge to be with my baby. I don't see how I can be away from her for so long every day. I know I'm going to worry about her all the time."

She switched Emma to the other side, which was a relief because she could eat with her right hand now.

Will said, "You know she'll be just fine with Elena."

She nodded, tearing up a little. "Yeah, intellectually I know that. I just have this fear that if I leave Emma with someone else, I won't be able to stop something horrible from happening to her. I know it's not rational."

"Hey, it's OK." He stroked her arm comfortingly. "What specifically are you worrying about?"

"Well, she still won't take a bottle, so how will she eat?" Lizzy had started pumping and freezing breast milk to build up a daytime supply, but what if Emma wouldn't take it? "And what if she won't sleep? And what if she misses me all day and cries and cries?"

"And what if it all works out fine, instead? Let's not borrow trouble."

She nodded and kissed Emma's head. "OK. You're right. It's only—I never felt this conflicted about the idea of going back to work before."

"It'll be OK. We'll work it out."

And Lizzy knew they would, too. She just hadn't expected it to be so complicated.

* * *

_Footnotes_:

(1) In the US in 2013, a woman generally stays in the hospital for two nights after she gives birth, provided it is an uncomplicated vaginal birth. In most hospitals, the baby is taken to the nursery at night for observation, and nurses bring him or her to the mother during the night to nurse only if the mother requests it. Nurses also wake the mother up every couple of hours to check her vital signs, all night long. A father may stay in the hospital room and sleep on an uncomfortable fold-out chair during this time. I imagine Will got an actual bed, though, in some kind of luxury birthing suite.

(2) European readers may be interested to know that mothers and babies are pretty much on their own after they are sent home from the hospital. Other than the visiting nurse described here, which is not standard in many areas of the country, no health worker, caregiver, or helper is provided by the hospital, insurance company, or national health service. The latter is because, of course, there is no national health service. To the extent that new mothers receive advice from a professional such as a lactation consultant, it generally happens during the short stay at the hospital, at a post-natal visit to a doctor, or by a private caregiver whom the mother must find and pay for out of her own pocket. Mothers also receive no instruction about, or therapy for, perineal recovery other than a suggestion that they might wish to do a lot of Kegel exercises. All of this means that women rely heavily on books, the Internet, and their friends and family for information about how to care for their babies, and also have to rely on friends and family for assistance with daily care of a newborn.

* * *

_Please drop me a line below if you have any thoughts about complicated friendships or other things in life that aren't as simple as you might have once thought. __I promise to respond if you sign in so I can PM you back._


	4. Chapter 4

_A/N: Thanks as always to my betas: Jan, Barbara, and Alison._

* * *

**Chapter 4**

For various only half-articulated reasons, Lizzy's parents hadn't been able to make it to New York to meet Emma yet, even though they had hinted over and over that they would. Lizzy knew that it was mostly because they couldn't be bothered to go _anywhere _anymore, so she tried not to take it personally. Still, she had to admit it hurt. She and Will had talked about it and agreed that, since Tom and Lillian weren't coming to them, they would go to Artemis. It was important that Emma have some kind of relationship with her grandparents. Thanksgiving seemed like the right time to go. Since Lizzy and Will's marriage, they had spent a couple of tense Thanksgivings with Lillian and Tom and spent the others with Jane and Charlie. This year, though, Jane, Charlie and the boys were going to spend the holiday with his family. Lizzy couldn't say she blamed them.

Unfortunately, all the uncertainty about whether Tom and Lillian would visit resulted in Lizzy and Will's getting a very late start in planning for the trip, and therefore a number of things didn't go as smoothly as they would have liked.

When Lizzy had first asked Lillian if they could come visit, her mother had enthusiastically welcomed them to stay at the house and insisted that she would pick them up at the airport. After some discussion with Will, Lizzy had agreed they would stay at the house but told her they would rent a car instead. It seemed to Lizzy and Will that it would be a good idea to be able to get out of the house whenever they needed to, which would probably be often. Lillian had been put out, offended that her car wasn't good enough for her big-shot son-in-law. Then, embarrassingly, the next day Ahmed had told Will that he had checked everywhere, and there was not a single rental car to be had in Artemis because of the holiday. Not a one. So Lizzy had had to call Lillian back and accept her offer, after all. Lillian had agreed, but Lizzy could hear that she was still feeling touchy about it.

They left early on Wednesday morning, the worst travel day of the entire year, because Will had meetings on Tuesday and couldn't get away any earlier. They took the WPD corporate jet out of Teterboro airport rather than driving. This had a couple of advantages: they wouldn't get stuck in the huge traffic jam on the highway out of the city, and they could hold Emma most of the way, so they would only have to listen to her screaming for an hour on the plane instead of for four or more hours in the car. Lizzy felt a little guilty knowing that their money was buying them a much easier flight than all the other travelers would face that day. But she didn't feel guilty enough to fly coach.

Lillian was her usual histrionic self when she met them at security in the private terminal of the dinky Cascadilla County Airport. Her bracelets clanked, and under her open winter coat her boxy Eileen Fisher linen tunic flapped around her equally boxy frame when she moved. She gave them, even Will, big dramatic hugs and kisses.

"Oh! She's beautiful! She looks just like you at her age," Lillian exclaimed as Emma screamed in Lizzy's arms.

"I looked like an angry monkey?" quipped Lizzy, trying to hide her perplexity that Lillian didn't seem interested in holding Emma.

A skycap materialized with a cart holding their mountain of baby gear and luggage. Another perk that came with not flying commercial, thought Lizzy, as Lillian led them all out to the ancient Volvo station wagon in the parking lot. While Lillian and Lizzy tried to organize the carry-on bags inside the car, the skycap loaded the bags into the back, and set the car seat on the ground next to the back door. Will tipped the man and grabbed the car seat.

"Do you want some help getting that in?" asked the skycap.

"No, thanks, we've got it," Will assured him, so he pushed the cart back into the terminal.

Then Will belatedly noticed that the back seat didn't have the LATCH hooks that made installing the car seat a breeze.

"Sweetie, can you help me figure out how to use the lapbelt here? I don't quite see—."

Lizzy thrust Emma at Lillian. "Can you take her for a minute?" Lillian did so with obvious reluctance, holding Emma a little away from her body as if perhaps she smelled bad. And maybe she did.

Lizzy and Will stood staring at the car seat base for a few moments before they finally decided to dig around in the bags for the instructions and the locking clip. After 15 minutes of wrestling with the car seat and trying to get the retractable seatbelt to go just _here _around the locking clip and failing over and over, they gave up on the base altogether and belted the car seat directly in with the seatbelt. The manual said that was acceptable as a last resort.

"Well, it's not the absolute safest way, but it'll do," Lizzy said as she leaned inside the car to examine their handiwork. Then she noticed blood on the seat belt. "Oh my God, Will, are you bleeding?"

"What? No." Then he looked at his hands and discovered that in fact the knuckles on his left hand were bloody. "Crap, I must have caught it on the clamp."

"Mom!" Lizzy called to Lillian, who by now was standing next to the car tapping her foot in irritation as Emma cried. "Do you have any bandages?"

"I'm sure I have some in here somewhere. Back to you." With obvious relief, Lillian shoved Emma back into Lizzy's arms and crawled into the car to paw around in the glove compartment, the pockets on the doors, and the underside of the sun visor.

"Aha!" she said, waving an old, disintegrating Band Aid, which she had finally found in the ashtray, high in the air. "Here, let me take care of that for you." She held out her hand to Will, who cautiously reached out and let her dab off his knuckles with an old tissue she had pulled from her coat pocket. Anything to avoid holding Emma, thought Lizzy.

Finally they all piled into the car, Lillian driving, Will sitting in front so he could extend his legs almost fully and avoid getting carsick, and Lizzy in back with Emma. She closed her eyes when Lillian swerved around at high speed on the up-and-down country roads, trying to will some airbags into being.

Lillian did her typical cheerful motormouth thing. "Well, we don't have a lot planned while you're here, just a dinner party tonight and the usual Thanksgiving _fête _tomorrow. Maybe you can go to the special farmer's market Friday morning. I'm going to have some of my pottery there in Lulu's stall, isn't that fabulous?"

As Lillian was pulling the Volvo into the driveway and parking it outside the garage so as to avoid knocking it down, she said, "Oh, did I mention that Mary and Kevin are going to be here for dinner? They're driving down from Rochester this afternoon in their RV."

Lizzy rolled her eyes. "No, Mom, you forgot to mention that."

"Be nice, lovey. They've come all this way just to see you and to meet Emma."

"I don't know why. We all know how she feels about babies," Lizzy grumbled.

Will gave her a questioning look, but she only mumbled, "You'll see." He had met Mary once, at their wedding. Mary and Kevin themselves had eloped, no family allowed, and they had never connected at holidays after that.

Will said he would come back outside in a minute to get their enormous number of bags full of baby junk, and they all went inside. Carrying Emma, he followed Lizzy into Tom's study to say hello. Tom got up from behind his desk to give Lizzy a hug, and then he stuck his hand out and said, "Will."

Will, just as coolly, reciprocated "Tom," as he shifted Emma to his left and gave Tom a firm shake with his right.

"So this is Emma," said Tom, drawing just a little closer and peering at her through the bottom half of his bifocals. She started crying. "I see she has her mother's fine singing voice."

"Would you like to hold her, Dad?" asked Lizzy.

"Maybe after dinner," Tom said. "Right now it smells like she needs a change."

Will silently went back out to the car to get the bags and gear, while Lizzy took Emma in search of Lillian to ask whether they would be in Lizzy's girlhood room.

"Oh, no," said Lillian. "Your old room has our exercise equipment in it now. Jane's room has a double bed."

"I think we'll need a second bed. What about Lydia's room? Could we sleep in there?" asked Lizzy. Lydia's room was a little bigger because it had been added on to the house as an afterthought following her unexpected birth.

"No, I'm sleeping in there. Your father's snoring has gotten unbearable. And Mary's room is the junk room, now. So, Jane's room it is," Lillian said, ushering Will upstairs and into the room when he reappeared with the first load of bags. "Why do you need another bed? Didn't you bring a portable crib or something?"

"No, Emma shares the bed with me and Will, but I don't think we'll all fit on Jane's bed."

"What?" Lillian was aghast. "You let her sleep with you? You'll never get her to stop nursing, never. Oh, that's a big mistake."

"Thanks, Mom," Lizzy said, trying to remain civil. "So, about the bed..."

"Well, I can dig up an air mattress for you, I guess." Lillian turned and started out of the room. "I just never thought you'd want—" she muttered as she headed down the hall.

During this exchange, Will had returned to the car for a second load of bags. When he re-entered the room, Lizzy said, "Well, there's nothing like a warm welcome to make a person feel right at home, is there?"

"Are you OK?" Will asked, rather than answering her admittedly rhetorical question.

He never, ever directly criticized Lizzy's parents and their shenanigans. If she complained—and of course she did, loudly and often—then he did his best to support and affirm her interpretation of events. But he, himself, never started it. Lizzy thought it might have something to do with good manners. However, she suspected it probably had more to do with the philosophy that while it was OK to criticize one's own family, nobody else should because it caused hurt feelings. Whatever the reason, when her parents were around, Will usually hung back with a pained expression on his face and didn't say much. There really was no point in mixing it up with them, anyway.

Lizzy took his hand and looked up at him. "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Look, I'm really sorry, but it seems like one of us is going to have to sleep on an air mattress. Why don't you take the bed and Emma and I will sleep on the floor? Not as far for her to fall if she rolls off." That was a joke because Emma couldn't roll over yet by herself.

"No, don't be silly. I don't think it's safe for a baby on an air mattress. I'll take the floor, of course," Will immediately replied, ever her gallant husband. He clearly had no idea what he was volunteering for.

"Have you ever slept on an air mattress before?" she asked doubtfully.

"Really, I insist." He had his "you are never going to change my mind, ever," look.

Lizzy sighed. "OK. But I'm going to start calling hotels right now and see if we can find a room in town. I don't think we can do this for three nights. Even one night is not a good idea. I'm really sorry. I thought it would work out all right, like last time."

Will changed Emma on the bed while Lizzy made some phone calls.

"Don't forget the diaper cream," Lizzy said, tossing it to him. "Her rash is pretty bad."

It turned out that there were no rooms available in any of the two relatively nice hotels in town for that night, but she was able to book a room in one for the two nights after that.

"I'm sorry, I really don't think you'd like the Cliffside Inn," Lizzy apologized, referring to the only motel where she'd been able to find a vacancy for today. "It has roaches and it looks like it's going to fall into the gorge at any second. I think it was even condemned at one point. I don't know how they stay open for business." It was no surprise that the Cliffside had rooms available for tonight, but there was no way in hell she was letting her baby anywhere near that rattrap.

Will laughed at this dire description. "It's OK. I think I can handle an air mattress for one night."

She apologized profusely some more, he said it wasn't a problem, and they headed back downstairs, Emma in his arms.

Walking down the stairs and hearing the sound of her mother singing and banging stuff around in the kitchen took Lizzy back. She had a lot of fond memories of peering around the doorway at the bottom of the staircase late at night when she was supposed to be asleep, listening to her parents and their friends' raucous, wine-fueled after-dinner conversations.

There had always been lots of jokes about ribald 18th-century French poetry from the guy in the Romance Languages Department, travel tales of all around the world from the raconteur in the Anthropology Department, and endless double entendres and allusions to Greek and Roman mythology from the guy in Classics. There had also been rollicking, good-natured, and years-long political arguments between the Adam Smith-loving economist and the philosopher, who had seemed to believe that Plato's Republic truly was a great model for a properly ordered world. Their wives had participated in these discussions, too. They were all well-educated and well-informed about their husbands' studies. This was no doubt partly because so many of them had secretly co-authored their husbands' dissertations, or at least typed them, back in the day when people wrote things longhand and then had them typed. The men were never allowed in the kitchen to clean up at the end of the evening because they would just break things.

Feeling nostalgic about those evenings and her stolen moments observing them, Lizzy decided to see what Lillian was up to. Will threw on a coat, asked Lizzy if she knew where he could find a blanket to wrap around Emma because he wanted to take her outside. She grabbed an afghan from the sofa and gave it to him, and then he headed into the backyard while she made for the big stainless steel kitchen.

"Mom, you said there's a dinner party tonight. Do you still have those as often as you used to?" Lizzy asked as she walked into the room. Glass of red wine nearby, Lillian was whipping up some kind of mousse-like masterpiece with egg whites and whipped cream in her industrial Kitchen Aid mixer.

After the roaring stopped and Lillian paused to measure out some sugar, she replied, "Yes, but not as frequently as before, and they're not as big anymore. I do miss them. They were a lot of fun."

"Why the change?"

"Well, let's see. Some of that old crowd has retired. The Murphys moved to Florida—they couldn't stand the snow anymore." Roar, roar, roar went the Kitchen Aid. "Bob died—do you remember his awful accident?—and Marianne went to live closer to their son in Detroit. And...let's see...Hugh totally lost it after Lavinia left him, and he sexually harassed his grad student, so I won't have him in the house anymore. Um...Louis was stolen away by Harvard. We still see the others."

Roar, roar.

Lillian stopped for a sip of wine and then went on, "But also, the department just isn't the same as it was. Did you know that more than half of the faculty in the English department are women now?" Lizzy nodded, vaguely remembering having heard something about that.

"None of the younger women have time for dinner parties. The standards for tenure are a lot higher now than they were when your father came up." Lillian scraped the sides of the huge stainless steel bowl with a rubber spatula. "Also, a lot of them have little kids, and you know what that's like."

"I'm beginning to get the picture, anyway," Lizzy laughed.

"Well, you know, times have changed. I miss that sometimes, but those days are gone. It was nice while it lasted."

"So you don't have any regrets about those days?"

Lillian looked at her curiously and took a sip of wine. "What do you mean? _Donnez-moi le chocolat_, will you?" Lizzy handed her the blocks of Guittard, and Lillian broke them up and got out the double boiler.

"Well, I meant...did you enjoy being a homemaker?"

"Yeah, I loved it! It was hard work when you and your sisters were little, and money was tight on an Assistant Professor's salary even then. But it was wonderful, _magnifique_. It was a great life." She put some water in the bottom of the double boiler, plonked the reassembled pot onto the massive range, and turned the burner on to a very low flame.

"If money was tight, why didn't you get a job?"

"What was I going to do in little old Artemis with a B.A. in Art History?" Lillian asked, raising an eyebrow. "Anyway, back then a family could still get by on one salary. I don't think you could do it anymore. A house like this is probably...I don't know, a quarter of a million dollars now? Or it was before the crash. I saw it on that website. What's it called? Pillow? What a weird thing to name a real estate website." Actually, it was called "Zillow," and Lizzy had to agree about it being a weird name.

"Did you ever think you missed out by not having a career? I don't mean you didn't work hard. I know you did."

"Thank you, I appreciate that. Hand me the wooden spoon? Like I said, things were different then. It was really hard back then for a woman to have a career, and I was never one to rock the boat. I was always busy, and I got to do and see a lot of interesting things because of your father's job. Do you remember the summer we all spent in the French Alps when he was teaching summer school? Mon Dyoo! _Paradis_!" She laughed, pronouncing it "pah-rah-DEE," French style. More or less.

"Yeah, that was great. Bread and cheese, yum."

"And don't forget the _vino_! But anyway, after you all grew up a little, I had more time for my art, and cooking classes, and _le jardin_. Those things have always made me happy. Enjoying the beauty all around us."

The chocolate was melted now and Lillian took it off the stove to let it cool. Now she devoted herself more fully to the glass of wine.

"I know it probably doesn't seem like much to you or your sisters, considering all your accomplishments," Lillian sniffed.

"Mom, you know that's not true," Lizzy sighed in frustration. It always came back to this.

"I think you all work too hard." Lillian turned away to stir the cooling chocolate to keep it smooth. "And you let that baby walk all over you. Sleeping in the same bed with you, for heaven's sake," she snorted.

"Mom!"

"I know, I know, I promised I wouldn't tell you what to do. She's your baby. With four of you, we just had to have a lot of rules and routines. Maybe it's different with only one or two. Speaking of two, you know, it's really not healthy to raise an only child. They're always lonely, and so selfish and maladjusted and spoiled."

Lizzy rolled her eyes and thought, as opposed to all the mutants in our huge family. "God, Mom. She's not even two months old yet. Give me a break."

Lillian laughed. "You're right, I know. Come over here and hold the bowl while I fold in the _chocolat_."

Later, while they were putting the mousse into dessert goblets, Lizzy told her mother that they would be moving to a hotel for the next couple of nights. Lillian looked hurt and muttered something that Lizzy didn't quite catch. She thought she heard the phrase "not good enough," though.

* * *

When she left the kitchen, Lizzy noticed that Mary and her husband, Kevin, had just arrived. Tom had emerged from his study to let them into the foyer. Lizzy took a detour into the living room to join Will and Emma before Mary could get there.

Mary was a difficult case. She had read Lizzy's copies of Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_ and _The Fountainhead_ when she was 15 and, much to Lizzy's great regret, had taken them absolutely to heart. She had joined the Students for Ayn Rand Club in high school, and had met her future husband, Kevin, when she had become the Objectivist Club president at Syracuse University. The two of them seemed to have some kind of master/disciple relationship, as far as Lizzy could tell. Mary was _definitely _the master. Together they looked down on just about everything and everyone, bemoaning the mediocrity of the world around them. They had their own architecture firm in Rochester and were working, one building at a time, to restore the city's architectural purity. Lizzy wished they would just get it over with and move to a damn cave in Colorado to wait for John Galt while the world ran itself into the ground.

Instead, for reasons that Lizzy couldn't quite fathom, they still periodically dragged themselves to family gatherings. She thought it must have been out of some misguided sense of obligation, because it clearly wasn't for their own or anyone else's enjoyment. They had probably come in their RV so that they could have their own space if the going got rough.

Everyone said hello, and Lizzy took Emma from Will and carried her over to Mary to be introduced.

"Emma, this is your Aunt Mary. Shake hands." She held out Emma's hand to Mary. Mary was having none of it.

Her lips in a tight, thin line, Mary snapped, "Very funny, Lizzy. Just because you breeders make the choice to have children, it doesn't follow that everyone is equally interested in them. She's incapable of rational discourse at this age."

"Yes, but she's surprisingly productive in her own way," said Lizzy, pointing to Emma's diaper. The diaper was currently empty, but it still made the point.

Mary put her hands on her hips. "That's fine, make fun of my beliefs. I understand that you're only trying to maximize your own happiness by choosing to have children. But just because you breeders make that choice, it doesn't mean that everyone else should pay the price. For example, why should _I_ have to pay taxes to fund _your _child's education when I have chosen not to breed?"

Lizzy knew that if Jane had been part of the conversation, she would have said something lofty like, "Because children are the most wonderful, valuable thing in the whole world, a beacon of hope and the path to a brighter future for all of humanity!" When Jane said things like that, Mary just snorted and muttered something about everyone pulling their own weight.

So, taking a more practical angle, Lizzy said, "Because children are the ones who will be keeping the Social Security system afloat when you retire, and wiping the drool off of your mouth when you're too old to do it yourself."

Mary looked at her like she'd gone crazy. "What makes you think I've been paying into the Social Security system? I'll support my retirement through my own hard work, and wise investments that I, myself, have made in the free market. Kevin and I won't have to rely on the _government_." She sneered, as if the government were the worst, vilest thing she could think of.

Yeah, Lizzy thought, and you won't get anything from it, either, in your secret underground lair. She smiled a big fake smile at Mary. "That sounds like a super plan. Oh, is that Mom calling me? Sorry, gotta run."

Mary and Tom got into a big fight over something or other before dinner, and so, as usual, she and Kevin left in a huff and roared off in their RV before the meal even started. Lizzy rolled her eyes, Will looked pained and confused, and Lillian sulked and fussed a bit. Then she phoned the next-door neighbors, old friends who were used to her last-minute invitations, and they all too gladly trooped on over to fill the eleventh and twelfth places at the very, very long dining table.

After the dinner and decadent dessert had been devoured and the dishes washed, family and friends sprawled out in the living room, passing Emma around and admiring her. Lillian sat a little apart from them.

"Here, Mom, do you want to hold Emma?"

"Oh, no, thanks. No need." Lillian looked away a little evasively.

"Really? I thought you might like to."

"No, no, that's all right."

"Mom, what's going on?"

"Well...you know, little babies are not really my thing. They're much more interesting after they can talk." She stood up and dusted herself off. "More _vino_! White or red, may-DAMs et mon-SEWERs?"

Will looked at Lizzy with a definite "WTF?" expression. She just shrugged.

* * *

That night was awful. Will's feet dangled off the end of the air mattress, and every time he moved it made a loud whooshing sound. When Lizzy saw the look of surprise and horror on his face the first time he heard it, she was _positive _he had never slept on one before.

"Are you OK down there, sweetie?" she asked, once she had nursed Emma to sleep on the bed.

"Yeah, I'll be fine," his disembodied voice floated up in the dark.

She started to apologize some more, but he stopped her.

"No, don't. It's not your fault."

She dangled her hand off the bed and felt around for him. He took her hand in his.

"I don't know how things got this bad," she said quietly. "I don't know how to reach them at all. They won't talk about any of the things that need to be said."

Will sighed. "I don't know what to tell you. I'm hardly an expert on these things." Will was still only in sporadic contact with his extended family members except for his cousin Richard and Richard's brother Sean, the congressman. Everyone else was off jet-setting around or consumed in one way or another with their own outsized dramas.

"But I think it's the right thing to keep trying," he said.

"Yeah, you're right. No matter how much it hurts." Lizzy sighed, too.

The three of them hardly slept that night.

* * *

Thursday was taken up by the creation and consumption of Lillian's usual over-the-top Thanksgiving feast. Lizzy and a couple of neighbor girls whose families would be joining the Bennets for dinner took directions from Lillian. Together they cranked out a huge, magnificent meal that contained three pounds of butter, a half gallon of cream, and a lot of ingredients that Lizzy, if left to her own devices, would have had no idea what to do with: truffles, chestnuts, wild rice.

Meanwhile, Will talked to the neighbors and played with Emma in the living room, explained the football game on TV to her, and took her outside to check out the quarry in the backyard and the woods all around them. Every two hours, he stuck his head into the kitchen, which was full of steam and enthusiastic banging of pots and exclamations in faux French, to call Lizzy out for Emma's milk break. He also stuck his head in at various times to ask where the burp cloths, a clean romper, the wipes, and sundry other things were. He could take care of Emma, it seemed, but he was kind of high maintenance while he was doing it. Through all this, Tom hid in his office, as usual.

Dinner was fantastic. As always, the party expanded to include close to twenty people, including neighbors and friends, Tom's students whose families lived too far away for them to go home for the holidays, and various other strays. They ate, they drank. It was a regular bacchanal. Even Will managed to have some laughs, sharing business jokes with the economics professor.

Too bad Lydia wasn't there. She and her girlfriend, Susanna, had gone to have Thanksgiving with Susanna's family in New Jersey.

That night, Lizzy, Will and Emma moved to the hotel. With a pinched expression on her face, Lillian watched them leave in a taxi, but she didn't say anything about it. The hotel was OK, not what Will was used to, of course, but at least it was better than the air mattress. They got a king-sized bed. All three of them were so tired that they went to bed together at ten o'clock and turned off the light, Emma nestled in between Lizzy and Will.

* * *

On Friday, Lizzy, Will, and Emma did indeed go to the Artemis farmer's market as Lillian had urged them to do. They wandered around for a couple of hours, eating golden fried samosas, and laughing about a stall filled entirely with baby clothing made from hemp. They debated the feasibility, which Will suggested, of combining all of the tofu stands and futon stalls into a single huge "tofuton" store, and checked out Lillian's pottery. The pottery was really not half bad.

Lizzy bought some artisanal walnut raisin bread that she knew her father especially liked. It was just the next in what seemed to have become an endless number of peace offerings to him since she'd gone off into the big, wide world, marrying Will and joining a social scene Tom couldn't respect and wouldn't try to understand.

She knocked on his office door and stuck her head in. She noticed that, before he looked up from his computer, he had closed what looked like an online poker game, leaving only his book manuscript on the screen. He'd been beavering away writing that same book for a couple of decades. She was a little concerned about the poker, although maybe it exercised a few more brain cells than Minesweeper or one of those other games.

"Hey, Dad, you want to come out and join us? I brought you some bread from the farmer's market."

"Oh, hi, Lizzy. You're all back? Well...I just find it so chaotic when there are so many people around. Why don't you come in here instead?"

At one time, they had enjoyed having far-reaching political discussions, and those discussions and arguments had been one of the things that had inspired her to become a lawyer. Now he seemed to have lapsed into political indifference to match his personal indifference. Whereas he used to enjoy complaining about the stupid policies coming out of the Albany statehouse or Washington, now he just said, "Ah, they're all the same. A bunch of idiots."

She went in and sat down at the chair next to his desk. "What are you working on there?"

"Oh, you know, my 'critique of postmodernism' book." He made air quotes. "The same one we were discussing last time." Left unsaid was that it was the same book as the visit before, and the visit before that.

When Lizzy had studied at Oxford during her junior year, she'd had a tutorial on contemporary political theory as one of her classes. Even then, almost 15 years ago, his approach had already been passé. She knew the book wasn't going anywhere; they both did. So they had a short, meaningless conversation about it before she could change the subject.

Sunlight was streaming in through the window, giving her a better look at him than she'd had earlier on this visit. She noticed that he wasn't looking too good. He was pudgier than before, his grey hair in an increasingly exaggerated combover. All of that seemed normal for a man approaching 70, especially one who had never exercised much or taken care of himself. But what really worried her was that his complexion was sort of chalky in a way she'd never seen before.

"Daddy, how are you doing? Is your health all right?"

"Sure, sure. The doctor says there's something going on with my heart, that's all. It's nothing."

"What's happening? Are you getting treatment?"

He made a dismissive gesture. "I'm not paying that doctor much attention. I don't think he knows what he's talking about. Wants me to change my 'lifestyle' or something. Forget it. What will be will be."

Lizzy grinned at him. "Really, Daddy? Quoting Doris Day? How prosaic." Neither of them could stand Doris Day. It was one of the many things they had bonded over when she was growing up, laughing over uptight Doris Day movies. Jane had loved them, of course. Anyway, she knew she could get more information out of her mother than she'd ever get out of him, so she meandered out of his office and to the kitchen to find Lillian.

As she did so, she wondered: had he always used his research, his writing, his work, as a way to duck out of his responsibilities and to avoid real connections with other people? Had he been playing solitaire instead of writing all those years, or was it only since he'd gotten tenure? Or was this something entirely new in his old age?

* * *

That night at the hotel, as Emma nursed and drifted off to sleep in the dark while they all three lay in the king-sized bed, Lizzy said, "Will, did you notice? I had a little chat with my dad this afternoon."

"How did it go?" he asked.

"Very weird. Kind of sad." She told him about the poker game and the never-ending book. "Mom says that he has some kind of heart disease. The doctor told him he has to exercise more and eat better, but he won't do it. She hasn't adjusted her cooking, either."

"Yeah. Lots of cream."

"And butter. That's her thing. Mom also said that if it weren't for the crash, he would have retired a few years ago. But they still can't afford to retire since his 401(k) tanked(1). He has to keep teaching even though he's really checked out."

"Hmmm..." said Will speculatively. Of course money was one area where they could actually be of assistance, but it had to be handled delicately.

'Yeah, I know. I told Mom we could help them out if they wanted, and she told me 'thanks but no thanks.' So anyway, they're just going to keep muddling along, I guess, until there's some kind of crisis. He's never going to get promoted to Full Professor, except maybe as a sort of gift at retirement. I don't think he's published anything new since he got tenure, and that was thirty years ago." She paused.

After a minute she went on. "This is it for him, really. This is what he's going to have to show for himself, and what he's accomplished in his life. Because he certainly wasn't a very involved father or husband. So the work is it. But it looks like he just frittered that away, too."

"Oh, that's harsh, Lizzy."

"I know, but it's true. And the thing is, would I feel less less sad for him if he'd published more, even if nobody read what he wrote? That's ridiculous, too."

Will asked, "Well, I guess what you're asking is, are we the sum of what we have done at the end of our lives?"

"Yeah, I guess he's got me thinking about that. I don't want to end up like my dad. But how's it all going to add up for me at the end of the day? I mean, do I have to have some brilliant career so I'll be able to look back at my life and feel satisfied with what I've accomplished? What if I only have a so-so career, like my dad's? Would that be enough, if it meant I could spend more time with Emma? I'm just not sure."

"You've already had a pretty brilliant career, you know."

"Yeah, well. But I'm also not sure if that's enough, if this is as far as I go. On the other hand, can I live with myself _now _if I miss out on too much of what's going on with Emma?"

Her father's story was pretty much written, as he approached the end of his career and the end of his life, which might not be too long in coming if he refused to take better care of himself. What would her story be, and how would it end? These were pretty deep thoughts to be having in a small-town hotel room, lying there staring at the light reflecting off the sparkles in the flocked ceiling and listening to Will's light snores. Emma woke up to nurse and fell back asleep again twice before Lizzy finally drifted off.

They left on Saturday morning. That was more than long enough for everyone.

* * *

_Footnotes_:

(1) 401(k): A 401(k), or a 403(b) for a non-profit employer, is a private retirement account that employees, and more generous employers, can pay into. The name comes from this sort of account's moniker in the tax code. Since the funds are invested in the stock and bond markets, many people lost a whole lot of money in their 401(k)s in the market crash of 2008. Naturally this most severely affected people of, or close to, retirement age. The US does not have a mandatory retirement age, so following the crash quite a lot of people continued working well after they had thought they would be able to retire.

* * *

_If you have something to share about air mattresses or uncomfortable family dynamics, please feel free to leave me a review below. If you log in so I can PM you back, I promise to send you a reply._


	5. Chapter 5

_A/N: Short but sweet this time—with a bad case of back-to-school jitters. Thanks to Jan, Barbara, and Alison for their fine beta work._

* * *

**Chapter 5**

**late November 2013**

After their return from Artemis, Lizzy threw herself into getting ready to go back to work the following week. There were a million little things left to do on her list, and the list got longer the more she got into it.

On Sunday Lizzy tried on some of her work clothes and discovered that none of them fit except for a couple of skirts from midway through her pregnancy. Great! It was like she was four months pregnant again. She was still about 25 pounds heavier than her pre-pregnancy weight and thought that about 75% of that must be in her boobs. She couldn't quite figure out the math of how things had come to this. She had gained roughly 35 pounds during her pregnancy, and Emma weighed almost 9 pounds, and weren't you supposed to lose some weight from fluids and all that after delivery? It didn't add up, but there it was. Also, everything was a lot lower than it used to be, and various things that used to be big were small, and things that used to be small were big. It was a bit mystifying. But the bottom line was that she had to buy all new work clothes. And some new big nursing bras.

She called Jane, and they arranged to go clothes shopping at Macy's on Monday afternoon. Jane insisted that they hire a personal shopper. Lizzy resisted at first, but when she saw how much less time it made the whole agonizing process take, she was secretly happy they had done it.

Aiden played quietly in the corner until he got into the double stroller to take a nap, and Tyler slept in the stroller the entire time, while Jane held the squawking Emma.

The personal shopper rolled in rack after rack of suits and blouses until Lizzy finally found some things that would fit over her new belly and boobs and bottom and thighs. She also tried on new shoes to fit her wider feet, and bought loads of control-top pantyhose. She hated how she looked—like somebody's mother.

Which, she realized as she stared at herself in the mirror in the dressing room, was exactly what she was now. She was somebody's mother.

* * *

The next day, Lizzy went to the hair salon for her first haircut since Emma's birth. Emma nursed under the cape. At first the hairdresser didn't want to do it that way out of concern that she might accidentally stab a wiggling baby. Lizzy convinced her that Emma would be holding very still for half an hour and would probably fall asleep in her cozy little cave. It worked out fine, but the hairdresser told her that next time she'd need to leave the baby at home.

Another item on the to-do list was to make sure that there was enough breast milk stored up for Emma's daytime feedings while Lizzy was at work. Even though she knew she'd be bringing home new milk every day, the thought that Emma might be hungry and not have enough milk totally freaked her out. So she decided to pump as much as she could.

These days, every time Emma nursed, she fell asleep on Lizzy's lap for a half hour or so. So Lizzy took advantage of that to pump the breast Emma hadn't been nursing from. It didn't hurt, exactly, once she figured out how to turn the suction down, but the milk came out just a little bit at a time. It was frustrating to watch the milk container fill up so, so slowly. She suddenly had unexpected sympathy for cows. Once she knocked over a full container of that liquid gold on the coffee table, and she almost cried at the terrible waste.

Just to make sure that this was all worth it, once she tried feeding Emma some breast milk from a bottle. Emma was having none of it. She wanted the real thing, not some cheap plastic substitute. Still, since the only other option was formula, which Jane said was like feeding your baby straight-up pesticides, hormones, and other nasty development-impeding chemicals, she kept at it and hoped for the best.

* * *

Elena's previous employers had moved to Chicago the week before, and she was taking a well-deserved week off. She suggested to Lizzy that she might come over and spend some time with Emma before the big day next week. Lizzy thought that sounded like a good idea, so Elena came over on Wednesday afternoon and they hung out. Elena didn't want the visit to be on the clock because she didn't officially start till Monday, but Lizzy insisted. She thought it was only fair.

Elena came into the living room and threw a burp cloth over her shoulder before confidently taking Emma in her arms and giving Emma a big kiss. "Hi there funny girl! _Hola! _Say hello to Tía Elena. You want me to speak to her in Spanish, right?"

They talked about all of Emma's amusing little habits and quirks, like how she would arch and squirm while you were trying to change her diaper unless you sang her "The Ants go Marching" and walked your fingers up her legs. Although they had previously discussed Emma's sleep issues and how she liked to be held all the time, they revisited all that in great detail. They also discussed other things Lizzy found she was becoming more anxious about: Emma's not taking a bottle, her yucky diaper rash, how much and in what ways Lizzy and Elena would communicate during the day, and so on.

Elena seemed to take this all in stride. She had worked with lots of babies, she said, and she'd never yet met one she couldn't handle. "Everything will be OK," she said, holding Emma and stroking her head. Lizzy wasn't sure if she was talking to Emma or to her.

"We'll work on the sleeping," Elena said to Lizzy, smiling at Emma. "We'll get that all straightened out for you. She's a good little girl."

"Great. What kind of strategy do you think you'll take? She won't sleep for me, no matter what I do. She's too young for crying it out. And I really don't want to do that to her, anyway. I just can't stand it when she cries—"

"Oh, no, of course not, never," soothed Elena. And she talked about how she would put Emma in her crib, and rub her tummy, and speak softly to her, and sing her the same song every time so that she would associate it with sleep, and before Emma knew it she would be seduced into a long and deep slumber. Well, Lizzy doubted it, but Elena seemed to have backup plans in case that didn't work out.

"Great," said Lizzy. "I really have a hard time when she cries."

"I know. We mommies all do when our babies cry. There's something inside you that hurts when they do, right?"

"Yeah."

Elena said, "I know it's hard, but we'll be OK. You can call me anytime during the day. I have FaceTime(1) on my phone, and I'll show you what we're doing anytime you want."

"OK. Thanks, Elena. Half your job is taking care of moms, isn't it?"

Elena just laughed.

The three of them spent some time on the floor. Emma got in her tummy time on the baby gym, and Lizzy and Elena talked. Lizzy wanted to know Elena better—after all, they were in this together, this venture of raising Emma. What kind of person was she, other than being a super duper nanny?

"So, you said you've been in New York for about thirty years, is that right?" Lizzy asked.

Elena nodded, apparently calculating in her head. "Yeah, that's right. Plus or minus. A little less."

"What brought you over here?" Lizzy realized she was slipping into interview mode like she did when she was gathering information at work, so she tried to throttle down just a bit.

"Oh, well... I was a schoolteacher, middle school. Then my husband died—"

Lizzy murmured, "Oh, I'm sorry."

"—and I had to make more money for the kids. Things were bad then in the Dominican, the economy was bad. My brother was over here already, and he helped me get a work permit, so I came over."

"Did your kids come with you?" Lizzy asked.

Elena shook her head and made the animals on the baby gym jump up and down for Emma's amusement. "No, the boys stayed with my mother back home. My sisters took them a lot, too."

"That must have been really hard. How old were they?"

"Two, four, and seven."

"Wow. Wow."

"Yeah, it was tough. I was working a lot, though. No time to take care of them here."

"Were you a schoolteacher here, too?"

"No, no. I couldn't get certified in New York. The only job I could find was working as a nanny."

"Wow. How crazy is that? Leaving your kids for someone else to take care of so you could take care of someone else's kids." Lizzy thought about it for a bit. "How long were you and your kids apart?"

"About five years. My first job was not so great, so it took me some time to save up enough money to bring them over. Then I started working for a different family. They had a pretty room for me to live in, and they paid taxes and Social Security and even medical insurance. They helped me get citizenship, too. They were really nice."

Left unsaid was that the first family hadn't done any of that and _hadn't _been really nice.

"Where did your boys live when they came over?"

"They lived with my brother and his wife and kids, and my mother, in the Bronx. She came over, too."

God. The Bronx in the mid-1980s had been horrible.

"Did you get to see them at all?"

Elena nodded. "Oh, sure, on the weekends. They used to come see me after school sometimes, too."

"I guess you moved into your own place at some point?" Lizzy asked, curiously.

"Yeah, but not right away. The baby of the family started school, and they didn't need me full-time anymore. My middle son was starting high school, and he was getting in some trouble. He needed me around more, even though my mother and brother were doing what they could. So it was time to go."

"Did you squeeze into your brother's place, too?"

"No, I got my own. It's nice to have a place of my own after all those years of living under someone else's roof, and doing things someone else's way." She smiled.

"Yeah, I can imagine." Lizzy paused. "Did your mom move with you?"

"Yeah, she lived with us for a while. Now that my kids are grown up, she's back with my brother, though. My niece lives with me now. My place is closer to her college," she said, clearly proud that her niece was in college.

"Wow. I see what you mean that you couldn't have made it without your family."

"Nobody can, honey. It's too much for one person. I never understood how all these little families, just a mom and a dad, make it on their own. Do you have any family you can rely on?"

"No...Will's family is all gone, or couldn't or wouldn't help. Mine are all off in other places, doing their own thing." She explained a little more about her parents and her sisters.

"No friends to give you a hand, either?"

"Well, not easily. We don't live close together, and everybody is sort of in their own little box doing their own thing. A lot of my friends don't have kids, or they're working and have nannies. Or in Will's circle of friends, they're _not_ working and still have nannies. I guess they need the time to get their hair and nails done and spend the afternoon drinking cocktails at the tennis club." She grinned and pretended to clink an imaginary martini glass with Elena.

Elena shrugged noncommittally. "Well, you look like you could use the time to take a shower and comb your hair."

"Oh, God, can you tell? I haven't had a shower today. This morning I took Emma into the bathroom in her car seat, but she started screaming and I had to get out of the shower before I even got wet."

Elena laughed. "I remember those days. Tell you what, I'll play with her for a while. You go take a shower."

So she did, her head buzzing with all the information that Elena had shared with her. At HRI she had been peripherally involved in a case about the rights of immigrant domestic workers. A young Pakistani woman, Amira, who worked as a nanny/cook/maid for a Pakistani-American family had been horribly abused. The woman of the house had done really unspeakable things to her while threatening her with deportation if she told anyone or tried to escape.(2) Writ large, unfortunately, this was a common enough story. HRI was trying publicize the egregious abuse in this case to pressure the Feds into doing _something _to protect women, like Amira, who basically just disappeared into somebody's house, with no labor inspectors or regulators of any kind looking out for their interests. Lizzy knew, theoretically, how it all played out. But these things had never hit quite so close to home before. Literally.

That evening Will came home from work late and they called for some Chinese food to be delivered from Chinese Dumpling Gourmet. After Lizzy tipped the guy at the door, they sat down to eat at the table in the breakfast nook. Emma nursed, as usual.

"So, Elena came over today to spend some time with me and Emma and get oriented. We had a really good talk. She has an interesting history."

"Oh, uh-huh?" said Will, mostly concentrating on his very yummy pork-and-green-bean dumpling.

"Well, I suddenly had this horrible realization that we're about to start participating in the structures of global exploitation of cheap female labor."

Will laughed. "Lizzy, we do that every day. Who do you think made this dumpling? Who delivered it? Who made that—" he gestured at her stretched-out maternity t-shirt "—whatever you're wearing?"

"A man delivered the food. I mean, we're doing this _in our own home_," she said earnestly.

"We're already doing it in our own home. Who do you think cleans our house?" Will asked, snagging another dumpling with his chopsticks.

"Oh, like you know who cleans our house," she retorted, a little irritated that he wasn't taking this seriously. She thought he still half-believed there were magical household fairies who would clean up all his messes, even though he did rinse out his own cereal bowl now.

He grinned at her. "Come on. Give me a little credit. And anyway, instead of looking at it like that, think about it this way: people, women, come to this country looking for a better job and a better life. They'd leave if things were worse for them here than where they started out. You're giving Elena a good job, and she's better off than she would be back...wherever she came from."

"The Dominican Republic. She's Dominican. I told you that before. And you know it isn't always that easy. Sometimes people get into things and they can't get out when they want to. They get stuck here." She picked up a dumpling and had almost put it in her mouth when she noticed she'd unthinkingly dipped it in the delicious-looking, and forbidden, hot oil sauce. She put the dumpling in Will's bowl and took another.

He shrugged and said matter-of-factly, "Sometimes, but you know, let the free market do its work. And anyway, you can do your best to be a kind, humane employer who she'll like working for. That's all anybody wants, I think."

"Hmmph," snorted Lizzy, putting down her chopsticks. "So we're just looking at this at the individual level, are we? No transnational human flows and big structural inequalities and all that?"

He crunched on some Chinese broccoli. "I think we have to. One individual woman, you, can't go back to work unless there is another individual woman, Elena, to take care of another individual _baby _woman, Emma. It's as simple as that."

"Oh, so it's all about _women_, is it?" Lizzy asked, ticked off by how he was framing this but also trying not to laugh about his calling Emma a baby woman. "Where do the men fit into all of this?"

"I don't know. It's a separate labor market, I guess. Anyway, this is how it is. What are you going to do? Are you not going to go back to work just so you can avoid giving someone a low-paid job? Someone who really wants that job, by the way? I don't think that's going to make anybody happy," he said, always the practical, utility-optimizing economics major.

She knew he was right. She couldn't do her job, which was an important one, and which she knew had caused some policy changes that made life measurably better for some people, without relying on those same people to do her housework. How ironic, or something.

"Yeah," she grumbled. "But I don't have to like it." She picked up her chopsticks again and reached for a dumpling.

Will gave an exaggerated sigh. "Aaaaah, First World problems," he said, referring to all the troubles and cares that came with having too much money, privilege, and leisure time.

"No, it's not a _First World_ problem. All working mothers everywhere need child care, and then someone has to take care of the childcare worker's kids, here or in their home country. It's just punting the ball farther down the field. It's like this big web of interconnectedness," she said, holding up her hands with her fingers intertwined at funny angles.

"I think you think about these things too much," he said, gesturing toward her hands and smiling. This wasn't the first time a conversation between them had ended like this.

"I think you don't think about them enough." She gave him the lopsided grin that signaled the discussion was over.

* * *

Lizzy spent the rest of the week running errands, tying up loose ends, and trying to remember all the things she knew she was forgetting. She went to the mothers' group and said goodbye, since she wouldn't be seeing them again. She and Emma also went to the Metropolitan Museum and took one last look at the fountain where Claudia and Jamie Kincaid had bathed in _From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler_, one of Lizzy's favorite childhood books.

"You're not allowed to run away from home, Emma. I'll take you to the museum whenever you want," she whispered in Emma's ear.

All day Saturday and Sunday, Lizzy and Will just hung out with Emma, trying to get in this last bit of togetherness before everything changed. Actually, Will went off to play squash at the club on Saturday morning with an investor and went to the indoor driving range with another for an hour or so on Sunday afternoon. But in between, they walked Emma to the park, the toy store, the bookstore, and a café. They even went out for dinner on Saturday, to their favorite Thai place. They sat in a dark corner booth so that Emma could nurse unobtrusively. Of course had to settle for a whole meal of one-bomb dishes. It just wasn't as good as their five-bomb favorites.

Normally when they went out together, Will carried Emma in the Baby Bjorn. But that weekend, Lizzy carried her, clutching Emma tight with her arms, too, trying to charge up her baby batteries, fill up her baby reserves, in anticipation of saying goodbye on Monday, and every day after that.

On Sunday evening as they gave Emma a bath, Will asked, "Are you all ready to go tomorrow?"

"Yeah, I think so. Everything is checked off on my list, but—" she trailed off with her voice full of doubt.

"It's not like you're actually going away, you know. There are stores in New York. We can buy anything you forgot," he said reassuringly as he washed Emma's foot.

"I know. I still feel like I forgot something important, though." She stared off in the distance, trying to remember.

"Well, whatever it is, you can call Elena, and she'll take care of it. And if she can't, then Ahmed will do it. It'll be fine."

"OK, you're right. Oh, hold up her head! She doesn't like it when you let it flop over like that."

That night, Lizzy had a hard time falling asleep. Once she finally did, she didn't dream because, as usual, Emma woke her up to nurse every time she was about to enter REM sleep. But if she had dreamed, it would have been of scary monsters and masked figures swooping down and trying to steal away her baby.

* * *

_Footnote:_

(1) I'm sure everybody on this site already knows this, but, fellow Luddites, please let me explain that FaceTime is a smartphone app that lets you make a video call on your phone. I am very happy it is so easy to make futuristic video calls now, like in Dick Tracy, but I was also promised flying cars. Where are the flying cars?

(2) This isn't meant to single out Pakistanis or Pakistani-Americans as being particularly abusive of their domestic staff, but just to show in passing that it's common for co-nationals to end up in these situations. In fact, abuse of migrant domestic workers is widely reported all over the world, and there have been famous cases in Hong Kong, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East, the U.S., and other countries/regions that bring in a lot of women from other countries to do domestic work. If you're interested in an advocacy perspective on this, check out the Human Rights Watch site on domestic workers' rights.

_Let's give it up for _From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Harriet the Spy_, _Eloise_, and all the other children's books that first made us fall in love with New York City__. Theoretical discussions about the international flow of female labor also welcome._


	6. Chapter 6

_A/N: my gratitude as always to Jan, Barbara, and Alison for their wonderful beta work._

* * *

**Chapter 6 **

On Monday morning, Lizzy was all ready to go when Elena arrived a few minutes before 8 o'clock. Mom and baby had been awake since 6 o'clock and had already nursed twice, changed Emma's clothes twice due to a leaky damn cloth diaper, and changed Lizzy's clothes once for the same reason. Fortunately, it was Emma's diaper, not Lizzy's. But at this rate she might have to go shopping again because she didn't have ten new suits. Will had managed to wake up sufficiently to sit semi-comatose holding Emma while Lizzy took a shower. Then he took his turn in the shower while Lizzy, Emma on her hip, double-checked the list of things she needed to take to work. Briefcase, check. Laptop, check. Purse, check. Pump with bottles and all the tubes, shields, and gear, check. There had to be a better way to consolidate all of these things into a smaller number of bags. She still had the feeling from the night before that she'd forgotten something.

Emma in her arms, Lizzy greeted Elena at the door, and they walked into the living room together.

"I'm going to head out now, and Will will leave a little after. He's always a bit slow getting out the door," Lizzy told her.

"Would you like me to take her while you finish getting ready to go?" asked Elena, as Lizzy looked around frantically for her shoe.

"Oh...yeah, thanks," Lizzy said as she hopped on one foot while feeling under the sofa with the other, balancing Emma on her hip at the same time. Elena came over and took Emma, and Lizzy got down on her hands and knees to look around for the shoe.

From her spot on the floor, she said, "How are you doing this morning? I just fed Emma and changed her. She doesn't usually nurse again so soon, but she wanted to eat a second time this morning. She'll probably be ready for a nap in about an hour. Did I show you where the laundry basket is?" She found her shoe under the coffee table and stood back up again, her hair sticking out all over her head.

Elena was rocking Emma and making funny faces at her. Calmly, she said, "She can probably tell that you're worried about something this morning, so she wanted to be close. I bet that's why she's nursing so much."

Lizzy suddenly realized she was indeed strung rather tightly at the moment. Between Emma's constant nursing and her own nerves, she hadn't slept much the night before, and she felt almost dizzy with exhaustion and excitement. She let out a big whoosh of air to get herself to relax. "Yeah, I'm pretty hyper this morning. I hope she's not too jazzed up for you."

"Don't worry, we'll be fine," Elena smiled.

Will came into the living room, his hair still wet from the shower.

"Hi, Elena. It's good to see you again." They hadn't met since the first interview, many months before.

"Hello, Mr. Darcy," Elena said.

"Please, call me Will," he replied, all business, before turning to Lizzy. "Are you doing all right? You seem kind of, um, frazzled."

"Yeah, it's sort of like the first day of school. I'm excited to go back, but I'm also kind of nervous."

Will took her by the shoulders and stroked her arms. "It's going to be all right. You know what you're doing at work. It's just like riding a bike."

"Yeah," Lizzy gave a laugh with only a slight edge to it, "only now I'm wearing giant clown shoes and riding the bike on a tightrope 25 feet in the air."

Will laughed, too. He gestured at himself and Elena. "Well, you also have a great safety net right here." He put his arms around her and held her close. He whispered, "You can do it. You'll do great."

Lizzy slid her arms around his waist and stood with him for a moment, until she heard Emma fuss. Then she looked up and saw that Elena had turned away to give her and Will some privacy. Another change to get used to: someone new in the house, witnessing their most intimate moments. OK, maybe not the _most _intimate, but still pretty intimate. She had long ago reconciled herself to the house cleaners' familiarity with her hygiene routine and kitchen habits, and to other people very literally knowing all about her dirty laundry. But this was different, a much more personal relationship, where she could actually see the reaction to her sloth or indifference or inadequacy. Well, there was nothing she could do about it. That's how it was. She could embrace it or fight it, and she decided right then that embracing it was the only thing that made sense.

She kissed Will, just a quick, chaste kiss on the lips and whispered "Thanks. I love you," in his ear. Then she stepped away and walked over to Elena and Emma.

"OK, I'm going to go now." She leaned over and kissed Emma's head. Suddenly she almost burst into tears. She hadn't realized she was so close to losing it.

Emma could sense her distress, and she started to cry. She reached out her arms toward Lizzy.

"Shhh, it's OK," said Elena, to Lizzy as much as to Emma. "I've got you. Give Mommy a kiss, and then she's going to go off to work. She'll see you very, very soon."

Her eyes stinging, Lizzy kissed Emma's hair again, and her cheek, and her little mouth, and one of her hands.

Elena said, "You can call any time. Why don't you call me when you get to work? You'll see, she'll be fine."

"I know. I know she will. Thank you. I really, really...thank you. I know she'll be fine."

Lizzy waved goodbye and picked up all of her bags. Will walked her down the hall to the closet by the front door, where she pulled out her overcoat. He kissed her goodbye and stood in the doorway watching her walk down the hallway, the sound of Emma's crying ringing in her ears. She surreptitiously wiped her eyes with the back of her hand as she pushed the button for the elevator. Good thing she'd remembered to wear waterproof mascara today, the first time she'd had any makeup on in two months. She waved goodbye, stepped into the elevator, and was off on her new adventure.

* * *

Lizzy decided to take the subway to work, just to feel like things were really back to normal, like she was a real, normal, working person. Her balance was off going down the steps to the station, so she had to grab onto the handrail as she descended. She realized she was used to leaning backwards a little to compensate for Emma's weight on her chest. Of course she had lots of other heavy things to carry, but they weren't in the same place, that empty, bereft space on her belly. Was Emma OK? Had she been crying uncontrollably since Lizzy had walked out the door?

At the same time, she thought, standing on the crowded subway platform and jostling against all the other commuters, it was pretty great to be here again. The familiar fetid subway air, her slightly sweaty body under her coat now that she was down out of the early winter chill, the rush to get to work and begin something important: these were all old friends that she hadn't even known she was missing once she'd been run over by the Emma steam roller. She would have two hands free at all times. She could go hours without a strange little creature sucking on her. She would have a whole day without changing a single diaper. It was going to be heavenly.

But then no trains came for a long time; this wasn't surprising since there were still frequent delays following Hurricane Sandy. The platform got even fuller. There was also a new and revolting post-Sandy stench in the station, probably coming from the only recently drained subway tunnels. Her bags seemed to be getting heavier and heavier. This had been a very stupid idea. She should just have taken a taxi. That's definitely what she would do tomorrow. She started to worry about Emma again.

After the train finally came and she was swept out onto the platform at her stop, Lizzy pulled out her iPhone and dialed Elena's number as she climbed the stairs to the street, bags swinging.

"She's doing great," Elena said. "We're just playing with the baby gym. I'll put her down for a nap in a little while. After that I think we'll go to the park. Do you want to switch over to FaceTime?"

"Um...OK, just a quick peek, maybe, please?" Lizzy squeezed up tight next to a newsstand so she wouldn't block the path of all the people storming down the sidewalk in their mad stampede to work.

The video of Emma popped right up on the screen. She was lying on her back batting at a toy giraffe hanging down over her. There, see? Everything was fine.

After thanking Elena and hanging up, Lizzy slipped the phone back into her bag and took a deep breath. Then she put her head down and joined the stampede up the block toward the HRI offices.

* * *

Walking into the office after so long away was like stepping out of a cool, air-conditioned building into a blazing hot, humid August day. It snapped her head back and sucked the air right out of her lungs, and she was sure that if she had been wearing her glasses they would have fogged up so she couldn't see.

"You're back!" effused Gina, her staff assistant, standing up behind her desk. "Hi! We're so glad to see you. Do you need anything? You have some meetings a little later, like we talked about, but I'll give you the details after you settle in."

"Hi! You're back! It's so great to have you with us again!" said Kyle, coming out of his office. "I left some papers on your desk. Whenever you can get to them is fine. We have a staff meeting at 10, as usual. See you then."

A couple of other heads popped up out of their cubicles, and they all said the same thing: "Hi! You're back!" and then they told her a bunch of stuff they needed her to do whenever it was possible, no rush, but preferably in about three seconds.

Well, yes, she _was _back. Lizzy went into her office and closed the door, seeking quiet. This was going to be interesting.

Dumping her bags on the floor next to her desk, she picked up her phone and called Will. "Hi, sweetie. Are you at the office? Can you talk?"

"Hi. No, I'm in the car. Everything OK?"

"Uh-huh. I checked in with Elena. Emma is doing fine."

"I knew she would. And how about you?" he asked.

"Yeah, it's weird, a big change. Kind of a shock to the system."

"I know you'll do great. Go get 'em." She heard a car door slam, and heard him say goodbye to the driver.

"OK, well, sounds like you have to go. Love you."

"Love you, too."

Lizzy pulled two framed photos of Emma out of her computer bag. She put one on her desk, next to a photo of her and Will on Mt. Kilimanjaro. Moving away from her desk, she took down one of the pictures hanging on the wall, a photo of her and her team with the plaintiffs in the first important case she'd had at HRI. She hung Emma's portrait in its place.

For the last eight weeks, she realized, her attention had been entirely focused on that one single little creature, trying to figure out what she wanted and needed, without any words at all. The whole universe had narrowed down to that one tiny point, Emma, and what she needed to survive. Now, suddenly, Lizzy was back out in the big, wide, chaotic, noisy world, where there were _lots _of words and _lots _of people who all needed to discuss and negotiate and get her signature. Wow. It kind of hurt her ears.

At the same time, it was also a relief to be back. This was something she knew how to do. Unlike when she was taking care of Emma, this was her area of expertise, her comfort zone. She could do this.

She sat down in her chair, took a deep cleansing breath, and prepared to lean in.(1)

* * *

After the 10 o'clock staff meeting during which her staff filled her in on their activities during the last two months and updated her on the status of some of their big projects, Lizzy headed back to her office and closed the door. After a minute, she opened the door again and stuck a big sign saying "Do Not Disturb" in magic marker on the outside. It was time to pump.

As she was sitting down to set up her equipment, she called Elena on FaceTime to see how they were doing. The short answer was, not great. Emma was screaming her head off. Her face was fire-engine red and screwed up into her fiercest angry-baby expression.

"Well," said Elena calmly, "we've been having a little disagreement about whether she's going to take the bottle. I say she is, but she says no." She was holding Emma on the nursing pillow in her lap, soothing her, and offering her the bottle.

"Oh, God. I was afraid this would happen. Do you want me to come home and feed her?" Lizzy asked frantically.

"No, honey. No need. I know it's hard to believe right now, but she and I will work this out. We'll try some different bottles, and different milk temperatures, and different places, and she'll find the one she likes."

"Hearing her cry like this...I just...I can't..." Lizzy could feel herself tensing up tighter and tighter, the wild, desperate mommy in her straining, trying to bust out of her chest like the alien crashing out of John Hurt in that movie. What was it called? Oh, yeah. _Alien_.

"I know, honey. It's tough when you're the mommy. Please trust me. She's a good little girl, just stubborn." Emma started thrashing around, and Elena said, "It looks like I need both hands right now. Let's talk again in about half an hour, OK?"

Lizzy said, "OK. OK. You can call me when you're ready, is that all right?"

"Yes, talk to you soon. Please don't worry. Bye."

As Elena hung up, Lizzy could hear Emma's wail—her most piercing, angry, hungry cry—as it hit a new, operatic, glass-shattering high. And just like that, very suddenly, the alien in her chest won the fight and Lizzy's milk let down with a big _whoosh_. Milk gushed out of her breasts; she could feel it dripping down her stomach and see it blooming on her chest like two perverse flowers in a stop-action nature film.

Shit. That's what she had forgotten to bring: nursing pads, and a back-up blouse. Damn it.

She dried her tears, again, cleaned herself up as best she could, and set up the pump. She got everything all put together and turned on and trussed in place, and fired up her computer to start looking over some urgent documents related to the Al-Harazi case. OK, she could do this. Everything else might be up in the air, but this, she could do.

Then, bam bam bam, she heard good ol' boy Andrew, who was the assistant to the executive director and whose office was nearby, knocking on her door as he was opening it. Simultaneously he craned his head around the edge, saying, "Hey, Bennet, I heard you were back. What's that thumping sound? You got a jackhammer in here or something?"

His priceless look of shock, dismay, and horror as he took in the scene in her office almost made up for her own feelings of embarrassment, dismay, and horror when she saw him peering in.

It _was _pretty horrifying, she thought, if you looked at it objectively. She was hooked up to a double pump using a black lycra pumping bustier. Altogether the ensemble appeared to be a cross between bondage gear and a terrifying mad scientist's apparatus, with weird Dr. Frankenstein-ish tubes shooting out of her nipples and bottles dangling down and filling with milk as if they were _robbing her of her very soul_. Tiny streams of milk were shooting out against the clear plastic breast shields in a rhythmic and oddly mesmerizing way. How did they do that, anyhow?

She glared up at Andrew. "What part of 'do not disturb' do you not understand, exactly?" she asked him coldly. "And, I'm expressing breastmilk. Do you want to see how the pump works?"

Andrew quickly averted his eyes and visibly winced when he heard the word "breast," turning bright red and mumbling as he rushed to close the door, "No, no, no, I'm sorry, sorry, really, I was just..."

Lizzy called Gina at her desk in the outer room and told her about the do not disturb sign, and the weird sounds she might hear emanating from the office sometimes. It was OK to transfer in a phone call during those times, she explained, but no visitors, please. Gina was all right with that. She'd been amused by Andrew's shrieks as he had sprinted down the hall to find a place to hide from the crazy boob lady and her freaky machine.

Lizzy made a mental note: Always lock door while pumping.

When Lizzy talked to Elena about 40 minutes later, Emma had taken her bottle and fallen asleep. She apparently just hadn't wanted to eat in their usual nursing spot on the sofa, and had reluctantly agreed to the third kind of nipple Elena had offered her. Everything was fine. Fine, that is, except that Lizzy had to wear her overcoat for the rest of the day to hide her ruined blouse.

Lizzy felt a little better. She turned back to the tall pile of papers and calls to be returned, all of them marked "Urgent."

* * *

Later that afternoon, she tightened the belt on her overcoat a little more firmly and went to the break room to make herself a cup of peppermint tea. Of course she would have much preferred a nice strong cup of joe, but no caffeine was allowed. How was she going to make it till the end of the day?

When she walked in, she saw Andrew fiddling with his own cup of coffee, tipping in a couple of packs of sugar. When she saw him reach over to open up the precious bottle of breastmilk that she had spent half an hour expressing and dump half of it into his coffee, she reached toward it and spluttered, "No! Wait! Don't! That's not— "

"What?" he said, turning to look at her innocently as he took a sip.

"It's just...that's breastmilk."

Naturally, Andrew spewed his mouthful of coffee all over the break room.

"What? Eeew! What the hell are you doing putting that in the fridge with _food_? Oh my God! I can't believe—" He gagged a little and moved to lean over the sink.

"It _is _a naturally occurring substance, Andrew, not some kind of poison. And what the hell are _you _doing using other people's milk in your coffee?"

She grabbed the bottle and put it back in the fridge, snagged a tea bag, and stalked out of the room. There was another source of hot water on the bottled water dispenser down the hall. That jerk!

Really, she should have known better, though. Andrew was notorious for pilfering other people's food from the common fridge, which was, in any case, a breeding ground for dangerous and probably antibiotic-resistant microbes. She made a second mental note to buy a mini-fridge for her office. And a label-maker.

* * *

When Lizzy returned home a few minutes before 6 o'clock, Elena was there at the door with Emma in her arms. Emma grabbed at her and started rooting around and making desperate sucking noises before Lizzy had even had a chance to put down all her bags and take off her coat.

"Hi, Elena. How did you two do today?" she asked, taking Emma. To Emma, she said, laughing, "Yeah, I know, I'm glad to see you, too, baby." They sat down in the living room for a long nursing session.

"It was a good first day," replied Elena. "It will take us a little while to figure each other out. But we're off to a good start."

Lizzy looked up from Emma to say, "Thank you, Elena, for _everything _today. I want you to know how much I appreciate what you are doing for our family, and for me, personally."

Elena smiled, "Well, it's my job. But I also like to do it. How could I not love this sweet little girl?"

"Yeah, she _is _pretty sweet," said Lizzy, watching Emma's look of concentration as her little jaws moved up and down. "I was really amazed at what you did with her today, how you got her to take the bottle. I tried it a few days ago, but she wouldn't have anything to do with it."

"No, it's nothing." Elena shook her head.

"No, it's not. I know an expert when I see one."

Elena laughed self-deprecatingly. "No, no. But please let me know if I do something you don't like. You're the mommy."

Then they moved on to the short daily briefing on Emma's excretory performance, milk consumption, and developmental progress. The pooping, eating, and smiling report, basically.

After Elena left for the evening, Lizzy thought over their conversation. It was interesting. What was their relationship? Employer-employee? Family? Personal? Business? Neither? Both? There didn't seem to be quite the right words to describe it. But of course the most important thing was that Emma was getting the care and love that she needed. That was the prize they needed to keep their eyes on.

It was 6:45 before Emma finally stopped nursing and Lizzy was at last able to change her own clothes. She had called for some pasta to be delivered while Emma was nursing, and that was on the table by the time Will came home, a little early, at 7:30. She told him about what had been going on at HRI in her absence, and humorously regaled him with a roundup of all the indignities of the day: her ruined blouse, Andrew's appearance during her pumping session, and the coffee incident later in the break room.

Will laughed, too, and said it sounded like she had it all under control and was taking the little bumps along the way in stride. He told her about the latest on the Copenhagen project and said that things were not looking good in Hong Kong.

It was nice to have these conversations again, thought Lizzy, where she had something to share with Will besides just a recitation of the shape, color, and consistency of Emma's bowel movements.

Lizzy still had some work that needed to be done that evening, preparation for a meeting the next day. She lay down on the bed with Emma to nurse her to sleep at 10 o'clock. By 10:30, she had managed to creep away without waking Emma, and went into her office to turn on her laptop.

Will stuck his head in the door. "Still have some stuff to take care of?" he asked.

"Yeah, just a little. I'm feeling pretty tired, though, so I'll probably pack it in shortly."

"OK. I guess I'll just watch TV till you're done, then."

She nodded and turned her attention to the computer screen.

At midnight, Will came in to wake her up so she could nurse Emma, who was crying in the bedroom. Lizzy had fallen asleep at the computer, her head tucked into the crook of her right elbow on the desk, and her left hand on the keyboard. All she had managed to write that evening was "_snerttttttttttttttaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaasdggggggggg ."_

* * *

_Footnotes:_

(1) Lean in: Of course this is referring to the book published in the fall of 2012 by Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook. In her book she argues that one crucial reason women still face a glass ceiling is that they lack commitment to their jobs. If they really want to advance their careers, when they have children they need to _lean in_ and commit even more to work instead of pulling back and retreating into family life.

* * *

_If you like, please snerttttttttttttttaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaasdggggggggg just below._


	7. Chapter 7

A/N: Thanks as always to Jan, Barbara, and Alison for their tremendous beta skills.

* * *

**Chapter 7**

**mid-December 2012**

After two weeks back on the job, Lizzy knew she was in trouble. She was so exhausted that she could hardly get up in the morning, although she always did. With Emma lying there fussing for her attention, she had to. But she was falling behind with her work and she couldn't seem to catch up, no matter what.

Why? Before Emma, she had worked super-efficiently during the day. Now at the best times she was only working at three-quarters speed because she was so sleepy. And, since she was leaving the office at 5:30, that was an hour and a half or so less every day at the office than she had worked before. When she had hired Elena to work until 6 every evening, rather than having a live-in nanny, the idea had been that she would make up that lost work time in the evening after Emma was asleep.

Unfortunately, about half the time she fell asleep on the bed with Emma at 10 o'clock. Then when she woke up to nurse her again at 12 or at 2, she would get up and work for a couple of hours in the middle of the night until the next feeding, after which she would crash again until Emma woke up for good at 6.

Other nights she managed to stay awake after Emma nursed to sleep at 10, and then she got out of bed and sat down at her computer for a couple of hours until the next feeding. But most of the time she fell asleep at the computer and didn't get any work done at all.

When she was at work, she couldn't stop thinking about Emma and worrying about how she was doing. When she was at home with Emma, she couldn't stop thinking about all the work she had to get done. She was overwhelmed with guilt no matter where she was, and couldn't help obsessing about how she was letting absolutely everyone down all the time.

This really couldn't go on. She could feel herself rapidly falling apart; she had less and less energy, she was getting snappier and edgier, and she wondered if she were starting to come down with something. Normally when she had a big challenge at work, she could just dig down deeper, or kick it into another gear, or whatever metaphor seemed helpful at the time to inspire her to seek out the extra bit of energy she needed to get it done. But now, she found, when she tried to dig deeper, she hit bedrock. There was no lower gear. This was all she had.

And she couldn't quite understand how all of this was happening. Will was very supportive in his way, letting her know how important he knew her job was to her. Elena was a wonderful caregiver for Emma. Nanny and baby were developing a great rapport, and Elena had gradually eased Emma into both eating happily and sleeping for longer stretches during the day. With this fantastic support network, how could she feel as though she were edging closer every day to completely losing it? She would have called her friends with kids to talk about it, but she didn't have time. She would have called her mother or her sisters to ask for help, but they were all crazy or too busy with their own stuff.

A big part of it, of course, was that when Emma was with Lizzy, she seemed desperate for her mommy because she'd missed her during the day. She had reverted to her earlier furious and frequent nighttime nursing habits. Maybe it was a growth spurt. Whatever the cause, it was like having a newborn again.

On Friday night at the end of her second week back at work, she asked Will to take Emma for some of the day Saturday so she could sleep. He agreed, but said he had a court reservation at the club in the late morning and so he couldn't do it till after that. In the end, he didn't get back from his squash game until almost 1:30. Lizzy was exhausted from nursing all morning and then fighting with Emma to get her to take a nap.

Will walked in the door, hair still wet from the shower he'd taken at the club, gym bag in hand, and she handed Emma to him while he was still standing in the foyer.

"Hey," he said, simultaneously taking Emma, dropping his bag, and leaning over to kiss her cheek. "Where are you going?"

Really fast, before she could change her mind, she said, "I know I won't be able to sleep if I'm here with Emma. If she cries, I'll wake up and feed her. I'm going to a hotel. I just changed her diaper, and I fed her about 45 minutes ago. There are two bottles of milk thawing in the sink. The nipples are on the counter. You just screw one onto the top of the bottle. Warm the milk up by letting it sit in warm water. Not hot water, warm water."

"What?" He said, as if she were speaking Chinese. No, not Chinese, since he spoke Chinese. Greek.

She picked up her coat. "I'll be at The Kellynch." That was a boutique hotel a couple of blocks away where they'd had guests stay before. "Really, nothing's wrong. I'm not mad at you. I just have to get some sleep, and I need you to help me with this."

"Um, OK. Couldn't we have talked about this before?"

"Yeah, I'm sorry. I was just sitting here, and suddenly I couldn't take it anymore. Can you do it?"

Will still seemed too stunned to realize precisely what was happening. "Um, yes?"

"Great. Thank you. Please don't call me. If you wake me up, I'll...I don't know what will happen. I'll totally lose it. I'll be back at 5 or 6."

She kissed his ever so slightly gaping mouth briefly, said "Bye," and slipped out the door.

Lizzy quickly walked the few blocks to the hotel, checked in, pulled the drapes closed, hung out the 'do not disturb' sign, put on an eyeshade and earplugs, got into bed and slept for almost four hours. When she woke up a little before 6 o'clock, she realized she'd just had her first dream since October 4th.

* * *

After she'd checked out, Lizzy called Will to let him know she was on her way home. He suggested that they meet up at a little Spanish restaurant near the hotel instead. It had good paella. She agreed and fifteen minutes later they both arrived at the door at the same time, Emma in the Baby Bjorn on Will's chest.

Since it was December, it was already dark at 6 o'clock. The restaurant was empty because it was early for New Yorkers to be dining, and so the hostess had time to exclaim over how cute Emma was there on her daddy's tummy. She seated them in the dark corner booth, which, like the other tables, had a red-and-white checked tablecloth and a candle burning in a little red lamp.

Will took Emma out of the baby carrier and of course she fussed and grabbed until Lizzy clapped her onto her breast, a coat rolled up underneath Emma as a nursing pillow. She didn't even bother to pull the nursing cape out from its customary home in the diaper bag Will had fortunately remembered to bring.

"So, how did you two do?" Lizzy asked.

"OK. We got into a little tussle about the bottle, but we worked it out. Did you get some sleep?"

"Yeah. I feel a lot better. Thank you for doing that on such short notice."

"Sure, you're welcome. Um, do you, can you tell me what's going on in, um, a little more detail?"

The waitress came and took their order. She told them it would take about half an hour for the paella, and suggested a few appetizers they might like in the meantime. Lizzy ordered them all because she was starving.

Lizzy said, "So, back to what happened today. I'm sorry, I should have talked to you about it before. I just suddenly felt overwhelmed. It's been a tough couple of weeks."

"You're looking really tired. What can I do?"

"I don't know. I'm still trying to figure it all out. It just seems like there aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done. Once I come home from work all my time disappears right into the Emma monster. I'm so exhausted I can't think straight."

"OK, well...are you ready to problem-solve, or do you need to vent first?"

"Problem-solve. Got any ideas?"

"All right. Do you want to stay at work longer at night? We could ask Elena to stay later, or we could hire another nanny for the evening. We can always get you more help."

Lizzy briefly covered her eyes with one of her hands. "Sweetie, I know you like to try to solve problems by hiring people to make them go away, but I don't think that's the answer here."

He looked mildly ticked off at that. "Do you have a better idea?"

"No, I don't. But it seems to me that part of why Emma is so needy at night is that she misses me during the day. Staying away even longer is not going to solve that problem. And I like spending time with her. She's my baby."

"You spend time with her all night."

"Do I detect a little jealousy there?" Lizzy asked, one eyebrow raised.

"No. Maybe."

"Well, you can always come join us in the big bed. Seriously."

"You know I can't sleep like that."

"Neither can I, obviously," said Lizzy ironically.

This wasn't productive. Will took a deep breath. "OK, so if sleep is the problem to be solved, then how can you get some sleep? Two things I can think of are: (A) letting Emma _not _sleep somewhere else, away from you, and (B) getting Emma to sleep through the night."

Lizzy nodded. "So, if we go with (A), that sounds like hiring a night-time nanny, or sending her off to the countryside with a wet nurse or something. Those both just seem crazy to me. We're not 18th-century aristocrats. For (B), I just really don't know. I've read everything there is to read about it, and talked to the pediatric sleep specialist, and it seems like there's no way to get a baby to stay asleep until its brain is ready to do that. It's a neurological thing. We can't just let her do that 'cry it out' thing, because that's to get babies to go to sleep on their own, not to keep them from waking up. Anyhow, she's too young for that, and I don't think I could do it anyway. You know I can't stand to hear her cry, ever."

"OK, but that leaves us with...do nothing. What, give it some more time? Hope she gets used to your being gone all day and starts sleeping during the night?"

"I guess." Lizzy sagged down in her seat even more, cradling a nursing Emma. "She's still so little. She's only ten weeks old."

"All right. We'll give it a little while longer, and see where we are in, what, a week? Two weeks?" Will asked, taking Lizzy's hand on the table.

"Yeah, all right. Let's hope I can make it that long."

They sat silently for a few moments. Then Lizzy said, "There are some documents I couldn't get through last week, and they have to be finished by Monday. I'm going to need some time to work this weekend. Can you take Emma for a couple of hours tomorrow?"

"Um...I'm supposed to go to the indoor driving range with Trip Thayer in the afternoon. Maybe you could call Elena and see if she's free?"

"Oh, God, really?" Lizzy asked, covering her eyes again.

"What? It's business, a meeting with an investor."

"I know. I just...I wonder if there's any way you can cut back on those things. I need some help here, from _you_, not Elena or some other babysitter. And Emma needs to see her daddy, at least now and then."

"You _know _this is just how business is done. What can I do?" Will said, definitely irritated this time.

"I don't know. I have no idea. Anyway, can you take Emma before or after you see Trip? Please?"

"Yeah, OK."

The ceviche was probably great and the toasted bread with garlic, tomatoes and anchovies was most likely delicious, but they tasted like sawdust to Lizzy.

After Emma finished nursing, she fussed and had a lot of gas. Will and Lizzy each took turns standing up to burp and soothe her while the other sat down to eat what was no doubt an excellent paella.

"Here, get her up on your shoulder. She doesn't like it when you hold her that way," said Lizzy.

They didn't talk much other than making a few innocuous comments about the weather, the food, and the décor in the restaurant.

The next day, Will took Emma to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, though he wasn't very gracious about it. And Lizzy got her paperwork finished.

* * *

On Monday afternoon, Lizzy received a phone call from Eleanor, the wife of Will's cousin Richard. Eleanor was a senior staffer for Charles Schumer, the U.S. Senator from New York. One of the topics Chuck's office had been working on for years was immigration reform, and so Lizzy had worked often with Eleanor to get HRI's views heard on the matter. Eleanor said that Chuck was trying to get together a group of senators, Democrats and Republicans, to come up with a comprehensive kind of reform that everyone could live with. Eleanor said that Lizzy really needed to come to Washington, _tomorrow morning_, to talk with Chuck and a couple of the other senators' staffers. This was the moment to make HRI's case with regard to some of the foundational issues that the rest of the proposals would be based on.

"Oh, and I can't wait to meet Emma! Richard and I will try to get down to the city in a couple of weeks to meet our darling niece, or whatever she is. Second cousin by marriage seven times removed? Niece sounds better."

Lizzy laughed. "I don't know, either. Great. Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow." She hung up and started to plan.

It would just be a day trip. It would be OK, right? She asked Gina to book her a ticket to Washington National. She hoped she would be able to get back home by 6, but you never could tell with the folks in Washington. She'd have to see whether Elena could stay late, if need be.

The next morning, she had to leave before Elena arrived, so at 7:30 she left Will in his shirtsleeves holding Emma, who had a full diaper, and dashed downstairs to get a taxi. All day she waited around for Chuck or one of the other senators' staff members to see her. She spent a fair amount of that time staring at the gargantuan and truly impressive chandelier on the ceiling in his office. But what with one thing and another, emergency this and that, she didn't even get in the same room with them until almost 5:30. Eleanor had kindly offered to ask the legislative director to find an unoccupied office for Lizzy to pump in during the day, and that had gone OK except that she was currently toting two sloshing bottles of milk around in the Senate office buildings and feeling like she was about ready to burst because it was time for another pumping session.

By now she had of course called to update Elena many times and finally had to tell her she didn't know what time she'd be back. Elena had said that she could stay late, but she hadn't sounded happy about it at all, and had said they would have to work out something else for next time. Lizzy felt terrible when Elena told her that staying late meant she would have to miss a family dinner at her son's house. Lizzy hoped it wasn't someone's birthday party or anything like that.

Lizzy also called Will and asked him to come home as soon as he could so that Elena could go to her son's place as early as possible. But he wasn't sure when he could get away. As usual, he had a meeting, and he didn't know how late it was going to go.

"Really? You can't cancel something this _once_?" she whispered furiously, standing against the wall in a busy hallway and trying to make herself inconspicuous by hunching over her phone.

"No! I've been working on this guy for months, and I think he's finally going to commit some big money to the project."

"Fine! We'll talk about it later. This is _really _not helping me here."

This was _not _what she needed to be freaking out about when she was supposed to be concentrating on the intricacies of hammering out a new path to citizenship for tens of thousands of people, and trying to explain why one senator's demand that someone build a huge, bazillion-volt electrified barbed wire fence along the entire border with Mexico would not just solve every single problem with immigration. Again.

She finally staggered in the front door a little before 10 o'clock. The meeting had gone late, her plane had been delayed, and there had been bad traffic coming home in the taxi from the airport. She had skipped dinner because she wanted to get back as fast as she could to relieve Elena and Will. She was starving, her breasts were leaking, and she really needed to pee.

Will met her in the foyer holding a nearly hysterical Emma. He didn't say hello, and he didn't kiss her like he usually did. Instead, he said, "Oh, thank God! She's been crying for you for the last hour and I had no idea what to do," and held Emma out to Lizzy, before she had even had a chance to take off her coat.

Seriously? She didn't know whether to yell at him, to laugh, or to cry. So instead she settled for dumping all of her stuff in a big pile on the floor in the middle of the hall, holding up her index finger, and saying "One minute, please." She left him standing there holding out a screaming Emma, and walked to the bathroom. Sometimes, just sometimes, Mommy had to come first.

Once she had settled down in the living room, Emma latched on, much to their mutual relief. Will came in and sat down next to her.

He cleared his throat. "So...how did things go today?" he asked.

"It was really boring for about six hours and then totally frantic for about four. I think I'm going to pass out from hunger. Is there anything to eat in the kitchen?"

"Uh, I don't know. I had a dinner meeting. I didn't get back home till about nine."

Poor Elena! thought Lizzy. A 13-hour day. God. That was definitely not in her contract.

Lizzy took a deep breath. Hmm. To pick an argument, or get some food? Her desire for food won. "Well, do you think you could take a look for me? Please? If there aren't any leftovers, maybe a sandwich or something? I think there are some cold cuts in the fridge somewhere. And, please, a glass of water?"

"OK." He got up and went into the kitchen. She could hear him rummaging around in the fridge, apparently unsuccessfully. "Where did you say the meat was?" he called.

"Um, in the drawer marked 'meats,'" she called back, gritting her teeth. She refrained from adding even _one _of the snarky comments that leapt to mind. She was just too tired for a fight.

Emma woke up what seemed like about every five minutes all night long, nursing for a few moments and then falling back into a light sleep. Lizzy thought that this time her darling baby, whom she loved so very much, might possibly suck all of the life-force totally and completely out of her body once and for all.

* * *

On Thursday morning, Lizzy had to apologize to Elena for a long time, and she knew it still didn't make things any better. Elena was nice enough about it, but Lizzy could tell she was still mad about having to stay the night before. She wasn't quite her usual friendly, open self, and she didn't make eye contact with Will, either. Had they had words last night or something? Lizzy and Elena agreed that they would need to talk about backup plans for when she needed to travel next, which Lizzy imagined would be soon.

When Lizzy slumped into the HRI offices at 9 o'clock, Gina greeted her cheerfully with a rundown of all the things she would have to do today to make up for being out of the office all of the previous day. Lizzy smiled wanly, went into her office and closed the door. She crashed down into her chair, and sat staring at the ceiling for a few minutes. Emma was so very demanding, and the work just kept piling up. Something clearly had to give. But she knew lots of women, lots of them, who were managing all right. What was she doing wrong?

Lizzy called Vanessa to see if she had any insight on how the hell to make this work. After all, Vanessa had a kid and she was on a partnership track, which was much more demanding than Lizzy's job. How was she doing it?

After playing phone tag for most of the day, Lizzy and Vanessa finally managed to talk to each other around 3 o'clock. Lizzy explained that she was really struggling to get her work done and that her energy reserves, already drained from not sleeping during her maternity leave, were almost totally depleted. Yesterday's travel had been the last straw, and she knew that there would be more trips coming up soon.

Vanessa said, "Well, you know that I cut back to half time, right?"

"Yes, and I also know that that means you're now working roughly 9 to 5 like a normal human being."

"Sometimes more. Well, anyway, we're doing OK. Michael doesn't help out much, and I have a babysitter sometimes on the weekends. But it sounds like the big difference here is that Tory sleeps. She's older, and she sleeps through the night now. It's hard, and I have to take a day here and there when the nanny gets sick, but we're making it work."

Lizzy sat silently for a minute, looking at the picture of Emma surrounded by Lizzy's work and vacation photos on the wall.

She almost whispered, "Vanessa, I am just not sure _I _can make this work. Not with _this _baby. If she slept more, or if she needed me less, maybe—."

"Oh, Lizzy..."

"I love this job, you know that. It's so important to me. And you know I know how to work hard, and I love that, too. But I don't know if I can do this." Lizzy felt terrible saying this. She had never given up, just quit, anything, ever, in her whole life. She wasn't that kind of person.

"Oh, honey. I think we've all been there. It sounds like you've finally found your limit."

"Yeah, maybe. Maybe."

"Have you talked to your boss about going part-time?"

Lizzy sniffed. "No. I guess I should, huh? See if maybe we can work something out."

"Yeah. Hey, I'm really sorry. Have you and Will talked it over?"

"Um...sort of. But his solution to everything is just to hire more people to take care of it. It makes me so mad."

"You know, he's not the first guy to do that, and I'm sure he won't be the last."

"I guess. But I really don't get why he doesn't understand, doesn't see, the value in just being there with Emma."

"I think you'll have to ask _him_, because I don't get it, either. Michael does the same thing."

They sat quietly for a moment.

Finally, Lizzy said, "OK, then. I'll let you know what I come up with. Thank you. It helps so much to be able to talk to you about this."

"You're not in it alone, Lizzy. Never forget that."

* * *

After Lizzy hung up, she decided that, if she were going to make some kind of momentous decision, it was time to gather some intelligence. So she took the unprecedented, horrifying step of calling Stephanie, the director of human resources. She had a list of questions on the legal pad in front of her, and she also opened up the employee handbook and pulled up a few relevant websites on her computer. It always paid to be prepared when you talked to those sneaky HR weasels.

Lizzy tried to avoid Stephanie whenever she could. Stephanie had that apparently prized HR combination of being totally rule-bound on the one hand, and absolutely lacking personal boundaries on the other. She was also an inveterate gossip who had a habit of spreading everyone's confidential personnel matters far and wide through innuendo and thinly-veiled hints, while never quite sharing enough to get herself fired. Lizzy knew she'd have to tread carefully, because otherwise she'd end up committing herself to a course of action when all she really wanted was information.

She took a deep breath and dialed Stephanie's extension.

Stephanie's phone obviously had caller ID, because when she picked up the phone she said, "Hello, Lizzy."

"Hey, Stephanie," Lizzy replied. "I have a couple of hypothetical questions about our company policies. I guess you could call them family-friendly policies."

"Oh, sure," Stephanie chirped. "Happy to help. You've just come off your maternity leave, right? How's your baby? Are you feeling OK? Oh my God, I had so much tearing with my first child, I couldn't sit down for weeks! I thought I would be all done with my hemorrhoid pillow after I gave birth, and then I just had to get it right back out again! Ha ha ha! Have you tried sitz baths?"

Thanks for sharing that, thought Lizzy.

"Um, no. We're doing fine, thanks. So, my first question was, you know, hypothetically, do we have any kind of a part-time track for new parents?" Lizzy twirled her pencil between her fingers and silently begged Stephanie not to ask her why she wanted to know this.

"You mean, like, cutting back to half time for a while?"

"Right."

"That depends on what level we're talking about. Do you mean non-exempt staff positions, or exempt managerial positions like yours?"

"Just hypothetically, let's say exempt staff, managers."

"OK. No, we don't, not at your level, for example. It would be too hard to find someone at that level to bring us back up to full-time staffing. Actually we don't do that for anyone. It's too difficult to manage."

"I see." So apparently they didn't have part-time for anyone, and Stephanie had just asked about the level so she could draw Lizzy out. Hmm. Lizzy firmly drew a line through the first item on her list. "OK, in that case, let me ask you about family care leave. Hypothetically, someone at the managerial level is eligible for FMLA leave, right?"(1)

"Yes, that's right. That entitles employees like you to up to 12 weeks of unpaid job-protected leave in a given twelve-month period due to your own medical condition or in order to provide care to a close family member with a serious health condition." Lizzy looked down at her copy of the employee handbook and saw that Stephanie was reading this directly from the section on FMLA leave.

"And, so, for example, for someone in my situation, maternity leave uses up eight weeks of that, right?"

"Yes, that's right. You had eight weeks of leave at _full _pay. Isn't that great? Federal law requires only unpaid leave, so our company policy is _very _generous. I just love how we really care about families here. Did you know that HRI's UK office offers a _12-month paid _maternity leave? That's the law there. Isn't that incredible? Wow. Almost makes you wish you could work in the London office instead of here!" Stephanie laughed heartily. "But anyway, we have 8 weeks. So someone in your situation still has four weeks of eligibility left in this 12-month period."

"OK, so here is my question: could someone in my position, hypothetically speaking, use those remaining four weeks of unpaid leave as sort of, um, parental leave to take care of her child? You know, because I see here," and Lizzy, fighting fire with fire, read from the Department of Labor's FMLA guidelines that she had pulled up on her own computer screen, "that the leave can be taken for, and I quote, 'the birth of a child and to care for the newborn child within one year of birth.'"

"Is the hypothetical child seriously ill?"

"No."

"Hmmm. Well, good question. I don't know. Let me take a look at something for a moment, OK? Can you please hold?"

Lizzy shuffled some papers and tried to work while she waited, but she couldn't concentrate. She drew little doodles of ferrets and weasels on her legal pad. Finally Stephanie came back on the line.

"Well, Lizzy, bad news. Looking over your personnel file here, I see you've already been back at work for three weeks, right?"

So much for the "hypothetical" smokescreen, which Lizzy of course knew wasn't fooling Stephanie anyway. She shifted around uncomfortably.

"Yes, that's right."

"OK, well, that's unfortunate. You see, the thing is that leave for your own medical problems, and leave to take care of a sick family member, those can be intermittent, like if you need a day a week to take someone to chemo or something. But the leave for taking care of a new baby can't be intermittent. You have to take it all at once, consecutively."

"Hmm. But I see here that the FMLA says the employer _may _allow intermittent parental leave. It's just not mandatory."

"Yes, that's right, but HRI policy doesn't allow for that. I'm sorry if that doesn't meet your needs. As I said before, I'm sure you'll appreciate that it's just impossible for the organization to find part-time replacements for someone at your level."

"I see." Lizzy was indeed beginning to see. If she hadn't made a point of coming back to work right on schedule, if she hadn't been trying to do the right thing for the organization, she could have had an extra four weeks of leave. Damn. She crossed off the second item on her list. "All right. And since you have my personnel file open there, can you please tell me how many sick days and vacation days I have remaining now? Could I use those for family care if I needed to?"

"Yes. In principle, sick days can be used to take care of an ill family member, and of course you can use your vacation days whenever you like. But you used up all of your sick and vacation days with your maternity leave. That's how it could be _paid _leave, you know. You had ten days of paid vacation time, and 10 days of paid sick leave, which is four weeks, and the organization _generously _gave you four extra paid weeks of leave after that."

Lizzy scribbled out the third item on her list.

"OK, I understand. So here's my last question, Stephanie. Is there any policy or arrangement we haven't yet discussed under which I could possibly take an extended unpaid personal leave of absence?"

"Would that be for military service, or for public service, such as jury duty or taking a position with the Federal government?" Stephanie asked officiously.

"Um, no." Not unless you conceived of bonding with your child as a public service, thought Lizzy. Which apparently nobody did.

Stephanie sucked her breath in between her teeth, and Lizzy could practically hear her shaking her head negatively. "In that case, no, I'm sorry. We don't have anything like that. It's not our policy to hold a job for someone if they take personal leave. But you might want to talk to your direct report about this situation. That's Mr. Redfield, I believe. At _your _level, maybe you can make some kind of special deal." Stephanie's voice dripped with acid with this last comment, although she was plainly trying to hide it. Aha. Lizzy had thought that Stephanie might have some sympathy for her given that she was a mother, herself, but there seemed to be some other resentment at work here overriding any motherly solidarity.

And, yes, Lizzy did know who her own boss was, and yes, it was Ian Redfield, the executive director of HRI. She crossed off the fourth item on her list over and over so it made a big black line. Talking to Ian was, in fact, the fifth and last item there. And she knew she'd better try to get in touch with him right now, because Stephanie would be up on the rooftops shouting the news that Lizzy was asking about taking family leave the minute she hung up.

"Thank you, Stephanie. You've been extremely helpful." Not.

"Oh, it was my pleasure, Lizzy. Give that beautiful baby of yours a big kiss from me." Lizzy could just imagine Stephanie's teeth gleaming in a wolfish grin, her finger poised over the phone as she prepared to dial the extension of one of her cronies down the hall in accounting with this choice bit of information.

Lizzy dialed Ian's assistant's extension. Ian was in meetings for the rest of the day, so she made an appointment to see him the next morning.

* * *

That evening, Will came home at 9 o'clock because he had had to attend a holiday party given by an important business associate. There had been a lot of those parties during the past couple of weeks, since Christmas was the following Tuesday. HRI's party had been earlier in the week, but Lizzy had skipped out early so she could get home to Emma by six. Tonight, they just had time to scarf down some reheated mac and cheese from Dean & DeLuca before it was Emma's bathtime and then time for Lizzy to nurse her to sleep on the bed.

Lizzy managed not to fall asleep next to Emma, and she padded, blinking, into the light of the entertainment room where Will was watching a news program on TV. She sat down next to him on the leather sofa, one leg tucked under her, and she took his hand. He clicked off the TV.

"No work tonight?" he asked, smiling.

"Not right now. Look, I need to talk to you about some stuff. I'm thinking about doing something kind of momentous, and I want to talk it through with you."

He nodded, and so she told him how rough things had been this week, especially the trip to D.C. Because Emma's sleep wasn't getting any better, just staying awake, let alone doing her job, was getting more and more difficult for her. She told him she had decided to find out what kinds of options she had on the work side of things, since it was becoming clear that he didn't have more time to give. Finally she told him about her talk with the HR weasels that afternoon.

"So, basically, it looks like my options are, gutting it out and trying to keep on going the way we have been, or quitting HRI, unless I can work out some kind of special deal with Ian for an unpaid leave."

Will tried to soothe her, rubbing the back of her hand. "He may be able to make an exception for you. You're pretty uniquely qualified. How many other former Supreme Court clerks are there who specialize in human rights and immigration law and want to have an underpaid position at a public interest group?"

Lizzy shrugged. "Well, we'll see. I don't think there's ever been another woman at my level who took maternity leave at HRI, so I don't know how he's going to handle it. But we have to be prepared. And I think..." She paused, took a deep breath, and looked into his eyes. "I think that if I can't get a leave, I'm going to have to resign."

Will sat stunned for a moment. "Really? It's that bad? I—I didn't know."

Lizzy hung her head, unable to make eye contact any longer. "Yeah. I can't—It's just too much. I'm at my limit. Beyond my limit. This is much more difficult than I thought it would be. It's harder than when I was putting in hundred-hour weeks at DeWitt. They didn't make me work all night, at least not every night. It wasn't hard physical labor. I had time to exercise. I didn't feel guilty all the time. I wasn't locked in mortal combat with a fickle and passive-aggressive psychotic boss. Oh, wait, yes, I was," she looked up at him and laughed, thinking of the crazy partners at DeWitt whom she'd worked for.

"Anyway, the point is, I don't think I can do this anymore," she said with finality. "It feels like a big mistake. If my maternity leave had been longer, or if we had had a different baby, I think I could have managed. But this is just not humanly possible."

"So...do you want to leave HRI and look for another job, maybe in January?"

"I don't think you're quite getting what I'm saying. Until or unless Emma starts sleeping, I can't work full time. Period. And as Stephanie so eloquently pointed out to me multiple times today, at my level there's no part-time work, either, so I doubt that will be an option."

"And so that means...?" he raised his eyebrows in inquiry.

"Stay at home with Emma. I don't see any other way."

Again he sat silently, gobsmacked. "Really. Are you sure? That just seems so—radical? Extreme?"

She thought about this for a moment. "No, I'm not completely sure. But I don't know if there's anything else I can do right now. Anyway, most of this is premature until I talk to Ian tomorrow." In a rush she added, "I think—I think that if I do end up deciding to resign, we're going to have a lot of things to talk about. We haven't been very, uh, _intentional _in how we've been doing things around here since Emma was born. We've kind of been stumbling around in the dark, staggering from one crisis to the next and...I think we're going to need to have some serious discussions about how we're going to proceed from now on."

Will looked perplexed. "Um, OK. I'm not sure what you mean by 'crisis.' Maybe I've been too wrapped up in this Copenhagen project, and with the deal falling apart in Hong Kong, but I really thought things were going OK. Obviously you've been irritated with me, but I just thought, you know—" he shrugged.

Lizzy nodded. She was too tired to get into it with him right now. "I know. Let's see what Ian says tomorrow. Whatever it is, we'll have four days, the long weekend, to talk it over." Both HRI and WPD were going to be closed on Monday, which was Christmas Eve, and Tuesday, Christmas Day. Elena had all of those days off, too. "Right now, I think I need to go to sleep. I'm a zombie. Is that OK? Can we talk about it tomorrow when we have all the information?"

Will nodded and shrugged. "Yeah, sure." He still looked like he wasn't sure what had hit him, but also like he thought he'd been wronged somehow.

That pissed her off. What the hell did he have to feel wronged about, anyway? "Will, it looks like you have something to say to me. I just can't deal with it tonight. I can't go on like this anymore. We're both going to have to make some changes."

Will rolled his eyes and said, "All right."

"Don't be like that. I love you," said Lizzy, and she leaned over and kissed him hard on the mouth. "Please remember that. No matter what." Then she went straight to bed and immediately fell asleep. Until midnight, 2, 4, and 6.

* * *

The next day Lizzy met with Ian. She explained her situation and asked if the organization could accommodate her needs for a few months by letting her work part time until Emma became less needy. He told her that he was sorry, but at her level there was no such thing as workplace flexibility. HRI needed someone to do the work full time. He said he would be really sorry to lose her if she did decide to resign, because they were very happy with her work. If that was her choice, though, she would need to hang around for a while to give him time to hire a replacement. He would be willing to let her work part time through the end of January, while she wrapped things up. She thanked him very much and told him she would let him know the next week what she had decided to do.

She went back into her office, closed the door, and sat looking at the pictures on her wall, images of weird newborn Emma, and happy, smiling photos with her workmates. Apparently she had to make some kind of Solomonic choice here. Well, it wasn't much of a choice, really. That was it. She would talk about it with Will over the long weekend, and, unless something happened to change her mind, she would turn in her resignation the next week. She just had to figure out the details.

* * *

_Footnotes:_

(1) The FMLA is the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, a U.S. federal law which says that employees who meet certain kinds of criteria (for example, work for an employer with 50+ employees, have worked a certain number of hours during the year, etc.) are entitled to up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave with job security for the purposes of receiving medical care or for caring for a parent, spouse or child who has a serious medical condition. (If you Google "Department of Labor FMLA Fact Sheet" you can find out more.) Employers are allowed to be more generous than that, but many are not. And as of 2013, about 40% of American workers are not even eligible for FMLA leave because they work for small companies, are self-employed, have not worked enough hours, or do not meet the requirements for some other reason. That means that they do not have the right even to unpaid family or medical leave and can lose their jobs if they opt to take time off for those reasons. Lizzy is indeed very lucky to get paid maternity leave.

* * *

_How about them thar apples? Let me know below._


	8. Chapter 8

_A/N: All hail Jan, Barbara, and Alison, my wonderful betas._

* * *

**Chapter 8**

**late December 2012**

Lizzy and Will spent Saturday, Sunday, and Monday in one prolonged, intense discussion about the last eleven weeks and about the future. It continued through their weekend routine of taking Emma to the park, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and to their favorite deli for Reuben sandwiches, and on short trips to the market and the drugstore for an emergency baby-wipe infusion. Will didn't have any athletic events scheduled for the weekend because everyone was off for the holiday, so he didn't have anywhere else to be. The only time he and Lizzy were apart was when she took a two-hour nap each afternoon, while he and Emma went out to look at very expensive and frilly baby clothes at various boutiques in the neighborhood. He came back with a lot of Christmas presents for Emma. He also bought a few things for Aiden and Tyler, since they were going to Jane and Charlie's for Christmas on Tuesday.

Intertwining themes and questions wove in and around their conversations. What was going on? How had they gotten where they were? Where were they going to go from here? How would things change for her personally and for them as a family if she resigned from her job?

It all began while Lizzy cooked eggs and toast for breakfast on Saturday. She said,

"I know this is crazy, because it's only been a few weeks. But I feel like we're edging closer and closer to living in a '50s sitcom. How did we turn into the Cleavers? I feel like that's what's going to happen if I quit my job, and it really scares me."

Holding onto Emma, who was trying to grab his nose, Will said, "It doesn't have to be forever. And I don't think we're turning into the Cleavers. You swear way more than Mrs. Cleaver ever did."

"Well, fair enough. I can't imagine Mr. Cleaver ever changing a diaper, either."

Will mumbled his agreement, as he kissed Emma's sweet baby cheek.

Later that day as they sat in the deli eating their Reuben sandwiches, Emma strapped onto Will's chest, Lizzy said, "Here's what I feel is the basic issue. I feel like having a baby has ended up being framed as being my problem, and only my problem. My whole life has been turned upside down by having a baby, and it will be even more if I quit my job. But yours hasn't changed at all."

"How can you say that? That's not true. I hardly see you, we don't have a chance to talk, we haven't had sex in forever, we don't sleep in the same bed. It's like there's no 'us' anymore." Will leaned to the side to take a bite of his sandwich, trying to keep Russian dressing from dripping on Emma's head.

"That's true. All those things have changed for me, too. But look how many things in your life have stayed the same. You haven't changed your workday or commitments at all, and you know what a big part of your life they are. My workday is totally shot to hell. I'm doing the vast majority of taking care of Emma."

"No, Elena is doing that, and I'm helping, too, especially on weekends."

Lizzy couldn't believe her ears. "Seriously? God! How can you say that? I have her all evening until you get home, and I have her all night and most of the morning, and I have her all the hours on the weekend when you're playing squash or going off to the driving range. When was the last time I had five seconds to myself, or time to visit a friend, or time to exercise? Except for last Saturday when I went to the hotel?"

"Hmmph," said Will, putting down his sandwich. "Well, I _have _to do all of those things on the weekends, and in the evening. It's part of doing business."

Since they were in public, Lizzy restrained her fury as much as she could. "Does it _have _to be that way? Why do you have to play squash with investors on the weekends? Can't you find other ways to spend time with them?"

"It's what they _expect_. If I want to keep this company afloat, that's what I'm _expected _to do. What can I do about it?" He threw his hands up in the air in frustration.

"How do you know it's what they want? Maybe they want to spend the weekend with their families, too. Look, you're the boss, you're the guy with the money and the name. Why can't you make them do things differently?"

"You know I can't mess with the investors. I have to do things their way, so that they'll invest, for God's sake."

She guessed that was probably true, at least for the most part. "So, what about inside WPD? Can't you more or less do what you want there?"

"Within limits. I'm responsible to the board, of course."

"OK, so why don't you see what you can do? I mean, you make it sound like you don't have any choice here, but is that really true?"

They sat and thought about this for a minute. He pushed his sandwich away.

"I don't know," he finally muttered. "I hear myself talking sometimes, and I sound just like my father. I don't want that."

"And I sound like Betty Draper, or Wilma Flintstone or...God, my mother."

They sat in silence some more. Emma fussed, and Will stood up for a minute to rock her till she calmed down. He sat back down again. He and Lizzy both picked up their sandwiches and started to eat again.

Finally, Lizzy asked, "How did this happen? Is biology really destiny? I guess with my maternity leave, I just started to do all this stuff without really thinking about it because I had time away from work. I wanted to protect you from the not sleeping and all of that. But then that set the pattern for how we did things after I went back to work. I guess we should have thought about that more before I went back, huh?"

"I don't know," replied Will, shaking his head. "Things were simpler when it was just the two of us. I'm not sure we could really have understood all of this before Emma was born."

Lizzy laughed a little sourly. "Man, Charlotte was right about that, as much as I hate to admit it. But the thing is, we just kind of followed the rules—like I got a leave and you didn't—and this is how things turned out, at least partly because of that. I guess you have to try pretty hard not to let that happen. Looking back on it, I think I just assumed that we'd be equally affected by having a baby because we would both be working, same as before. But we're not. The same rules affected us differently."

He pondered this for a while as they ate. "So, are you saying you want to challenge the rules? Like you want me to take a leave from my job now, and you'll keep working?"

"Well, no. With all the sleep and nursing and travel issues, and the volume and intensity of my work, I don't really think that's possible." She paused. "But just for the sake of argument, is that something you would want to do?"

He didn't answer directly. "I don't want to feel like you're quitting your job because I made you do it, because of something I did or didn't do. That's the last thing I would want. I know how important your work is to you."

"Well, frankly, you haven't been making things any easier for me, going back to work."

"Oh, shit. I'm sorry." He looked like he really meant it, and he didn't apologize easily as a rule. That made Lizzy feel a little better. "Why didn't you say something before?"

"Because you just tell me to hire help every time I try, that's why!" She realized that wasn't completely fair, though. Before he could retort, she went on, "I know, I know. I also think...I thought I was supposed to be able to handle it all myself, and then when I couldn't, I didn't know what I needed to make things better."

"What do you need?"

"I don't know, still, if there's anything that can make things work the way they are right now. Anyway, no, I don't feel like _you're_ forcing me into a position where I have to quit. Like I said, the sleep, and the nursing and travel and the work itself, I think that's probably enough right there, no matter what you did or didn't do."

They sat in silence for a moment before Lizzy continued.

"I think for both of us, work has always been the most important thing. We've limited it in some ways so we could spend time together, but, you know, if there was a work thing, then we'd let that take precedence."

Will nodded. "Yeah, and I thought that was the best way for me to show you how much I respected you and your work, to help you be the best you could be. We talked about that before we got married. That's what I've been trying to do since Emma was born, too. I thought that was what you wanted, the career."

"Yes, you're right, I do. Thank you for understanding that. But I think...things just look a little different now that Emma is around. I'd like us to think about this, take some time to re-evaluate whether we're still going to let work be, sort of, this trump card that beats everything else, family, every time."

"I see what you're saying, but you know, I _have _to work these hours. It's part of the job. And in answer to your earlier question, no, I don't think I could take a leave. At my level you can't just walk away like that. Not to sound conceited or anything, but the company doesn't run without me." He sounded really frustrated.

"Yeah, I know. Although of course I _did _just take a leave, and I thought _I _was indispensable, too. Turns out I wasn't, right? Because the litigation group at HRI didn't fall apart when I was away. But I think this kind of thing is what we have to think about, at least. Does it have to be that way? I don't know. I don't have any answers."

They had finished their sandwiches, and Emma was working up to an expert-level fuss, so they stood up to go back to the apartment for her feeding and Lizzy's nap.

Will smiled a tiny smile and said, "Well, we've had the airing of grievances a little early this year. Shall we put up the Festivus pole after we get back home?"(1)

* * *

That evening, as they were both kneeling on the bathroom floor giving Emma a bath in her little tub inside the big tub, he said, "I don't want to sleep in the guest room anymore. It's not that I'm some horny teenager or anything like that, but..."

She nodded, reaching for the baby shampoo. "I know. Sleeping apart all the time is awful." Sleeping apart meant that they didn't have the ability to fall asleep in each other's arms, to end the day in togetherness. It wasn't that they weren't affectionate at other times—they were. They hugged, and kissed, and held hands, and snuggled with Emma on the sofa all the time. But it wasn't the same.

She continued, rubbing shampoo into Emma's hair, "I don't even remember the last time we made love. Do you?"

He shrugged and filled up a cup with water to rinse Emma's hair. "Um...I can't remember, either. After I came back from Copenhagen that time, maybe?" Whenever it had been, the fact was that it was weeks, or maybe even months, before Emma was born. And how could they now, when Lizzy fell asleep with Emma every night? They'd always made love at night or in the morning when they first woke up, and that wasn't going to happen again the way things were going.

"I really miss it," she said, taking the cup and rinsing Emma's hair. "I miss us. I miss _you_." It wasn't that he wasn't around, of course, because he was there at night and on weekends. But she missed the closeness that they'd had before Emma. Making love with Will was fun, and it felt great, and sometimes when she looked at him she just couldn't wait to hit that. Or at least she'd felt that way a lot before Emma. But Lizzy also knew that what was even more important for them as partners was where they got to after they had made love. It was a place of deep connection, all their barriers down, where they could really _see _each other, where they could talk about things and feelings that the cares of daily life obscured or drowned out. It had always been like that with them, from the beginning. They needed to get there again.

"I miss you, too," he said, as he lifted Emma out of the little tub and put her into the towel in Lizzy's waiting arms. "A lot."

* * *

That evening, Lizzy nursed Emma to sleep on the big bed, and managed to stay awake afterwards. She went into the entertainment room where Will was watching SportsCenter and sat down beside him on the sofa. He put his arm around her shoulders and she pressed closer and slipped her arms around him, too. She whispered in his ear, "Do you want to go give it a try?"

He immediately turned off the TV and tossed the remote onto the coffee table. He looked over at her. "Really? Yeah."

He stood up and lifted her up in his arms, cradling her, which of course wasn't as easy as it once was.

She laughed quietly. "What are you waiting for, then? Shhh, don't wake Emma."

By their pre-Emma standards, it wasn't a great success. They fumbled around, and they were both nervous that Emma would wake up and interrupt them. He came too fast, while Lizzy required some extra coaxing and half a bottle of lube. Various of her previously trusty erogenous zones seemed either to have taken a short hike or disappeared altogether. Things had evidently not magically rebounded right back into place following Emma's not-so-graceful exit.

But none of it really mattered. When Lizzy had slid into bed, naked, next to him, and felt his familiar, beloved body next to hers, she had sighed and felt like she had finally come home after a long, long absence. She hadn't cared that her belly still stuck out and had angry red tiger stripes on it, or that her huge boobs kept getting in the way. Will hadn't seemed to mind any of that, either. To the contrary, he had appeared to appreciate that her assets had been accumulating a lot of interest in some fantastically profitable growth fund all those past weeks.

Indeed he expressed rather excessive admiration for all of her new topography, as did she for his more familiar terrain. They had to navigate some new streams, explore some new routes, draw up some new maps, but eventually, together, they got to their promised land. The journey's greatest joy was in having the right traveling companion.

Afterwards, Lizzy realized she hadn't felt so calm, nor had her mind felt so quiet, in weeks. The cacophony of deadlines and crying babies and trying so hard not to disappoint anyone was finally, finally gone. All that remained was this golden silence, the peaceful connection that she knew could heal many hurts, make forgiveness easier, and get them through difficult times. A reservoir of goodwill at the end of a long, winding journey.

"God, I love you," she said as she held him fast and basked in his gaze.

"I love you, too. More than I know how to say." He softly kissed her closed eyes, the tip of her nose, her lips.

They clung to each other, replenishing what had been lost. They fell asleep, entangled, as close as they could be. It was heaven.

Ten minutes later, Emma started crying and Lizzy got up and pulled on her pajamas to go feed her. But she felt all right about it. One problem down, one million more to go.

Will followed her into the bedroom and joined them in the big bed that night, and every night after. Emma wiggled and kicked and snorted and cried all night long, but they were happier anyway. In the morning they shoved the bed over against the wall, the gap between bed and wall carefully blocked. They put Emma's little "safe sleeper" co-sleeping mattress thingy on the bed next to the wall. Now Lizzy and Will could fall asleep in each other's arms again. The length of his morning showers and the frequency of his squash games decreased noticeably after that.

* * *

Sunday morning they took a walk in the park after brunch. As they walked along, he said, "I feel like you want and need new things from me, but I don't know what they are. I feel like no matter what I try to do, I haven't done it enough, and it isn't good enough."

Lizzy sighed. "I don't know what I want from you, either. But I don't know what _I _want from me, or what _you _want from _me_, either. I think that's what we need to talk about. But what do you mean about what you do not being good enough?" she asked.

Hands in his jacket pockets, he looked off at the trees. "I mean, I try to help take care of Emma when I can, but you're always correcting me and telling me I haven't done it right."

She tugged on his arm. "Now, right there in what you said is one basic problem: you're _helping _me take care of Emma, you're not taking care of her yourself. I'm the one doing it, or Elena, and you're the helper. _We _have a child, together! It's not just me, my job, to take care of her, and you show up to lend a hand when it's convenient!" She was starting to get pretty exercised, but she knew he didn't respond well to that. And who would, really? So she took a deep breath and looped her arm through his. "But, OK, tell me more about this other thing. The not good enough thing."

"OK. Just for example, at the restaurant the other night, you told me that I wasn't burping Emma the right way, and you took her away from me." He sounded hurt. She had had no idea.

"I did?" She thought about it. "Huh, I guess I did. But I spend so much more time with her, sometimes I know what she wants or needs more than you do. What should I do?"

He looked down at her. "If you want me to do more, then you need to _let _me do it. Maybe I'll screw it up, but maybe I won't. I'll figure it out in the end. Plus, it's not the end of the world if she cries."

"No, I know it's not. But sometimes it _feels _like it. It tears me up when Emma cries. I know that's not rational, but it does."

"Do you really think I'm going to break her or something?" Will asked incredulously.

"No, I'm pretty sure you won't. But doesn't it get you right here"—she pointed at her chest—"when she cries?"

"No. Not in the same way. Maybe it's a mommy thing. You know, a special bond."

"Don't _you _want to have a special bond with her?"

"I don't think I can, not in the same way. No boobs."

Lizzy stopped, aghast, and turned to look at him. "Do you really believe that? That it's all about biology, and there's nothing you can do about it?"

He shrugged, jiggling Emma up and down.

"Oh, come on. You can at least try. If you don't spend more time with her, of course you'll never have that bond. But if you do, you might. You could be missing out on something really good. I can't believe you're not even interested in trying."

"I am. But you know what my job is like."

Lizzy sighed in exasperation. She knew it was time to change the subject when he got like this.

They walked in silence for a while. Finally, she asked, "OK, what else have I been on your case about, besides the burping?"

"Diaper changing. I know how to do that. I used to change Georgie. And laundry. Don't make fun of me because I don't know how to do stuff I never did before."

"Wait, so now you're anxious to jump up and do all these things?" It was Lizzy's turn to be incredulous.

"No, I wouldn't say that. But if you want me to do stuff, don't criticize me for doing it wrong. Why would I even want to try if you're going to do that?"

"Huh," said Lizzy. She knew that she was hardly the expert on all this household stuff, but if he thought she'd been on his back about this, then she must have been. What was more important to her, anyway, having something done just the way she liked it, or not having to do it at all? If she put it that way, the answer seemed obvious.

"OK," she said. "I'll dial it down. I do want you to do what you can without feeling criticized. Please nudge me if I do it again. Believe me, I don't want to be the person who is charge of everything domestic. That is definitely not my forte."

He nodded his agreement. "OK, I will."

They turned up a hill and stopped at the top to enjoy the prospect.

"Can you do something for me, too?" she asked.

"I'll try. What is it?" he said.

"Please don't assume that I'm some kind of omniscient domestic goddess who knows where everything is. Because I'm not and I don't."

"OK. I guess that means you don't want me to ask you where things are all the time." She nodded. "So what should I do if I don't know where something is?"

"Um, I don't know, _look _for it?" That hadn't come out sounding very nice, she realized. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way. What if you say, uh, 'You don't happen to know where the blah-blah-blah is, do you?'"

"All right. I'll give it a try."

* * *

Later, after Lizzy's afternoon nap and Will and Emma's second Christmas shopping spree, they sat down at the table in the breakfast nook to eat some chicken soup and heavy brown bread that Will had brought home for dinner from the organic market. When Lizzy insisted, Emma grudgingly consented to lie in her car seat instead of sitting on Lizzy's lap and knocking over everyone's hot soup.

Suddenly, Will said, "I want to be a good father. But I'm not sure what a good father is. I'm pretty sure it's not just someone who brings home the bacon."

Lizzy looked him in the eye and said, "Sweetheart, you're already a good father. A great father. You love her, you—"

He shook his head and broke in, "But I feel like you want something more than that from me."

Lizzy jumped back in, waving her hand. "Please don't keep saying that. Talking about what I _want from you_ is not going to get us to a productive place. Like I said before, I have no idea how to work all of this out. I just want us to think about things instead of defaulting to a status quo that doesn't make us happy." She took a piece of bread and put some butter on it. "I guess I need to ask, then, _does _the status quo make you happy?"

"I don't know. One thing I am sure of, though, is that I don't want to be the kind of father my dad was. Sometimes I saw him to say goodnight, but mostly he was a special-occasion kind of dad. Busy on weekends with business stuff, and travel, and all that. I can see myself slipping into that kind of thing, like you said. But I don't know how to do better given the demands of my job."

"Hmm." She thought about this as she picked Emma's butterfly chew toy up off the floor, brushed it off, and gave it back to her. "Well, please just consider this for a second. As CEO, do you _have _to keep working like this? I mean, you know you could hand day-to-day operations over to Carmen"—his executive VP—"any time and everything would be fine. You don't actually _have _to work if you don't want to."

And that was, in fact, the elephant in the room: neither of them actually _had _to work, at least not for the money.

Maybe she'd actually just come out with it. "If we wanted to, we could just buy an island in the Caribbean and sit around on _chaises longues_ sipping fruity drinks out of coconuts for the rest of our lives." There.

"No...I don't really like rum that much," he said wryly. "But seriously, no, I don't think I could live like that. When I see how screwed up my cousins are, and what it's done to them to have nothing to do except play around, and Georgie, too, I just... No. I like working. It gives my life structure, and meaning, and especially now with what we're doing at WPD, it makes me feel useful and like I'm doing something to make the world a better place. Building a legacy, sort of."

"Yeah, that's how I feel about my work, as well. But, you know, Emma is our legacy, too. And look, our little legacy has her pooping face on."

He laughed. "Yup. I'll get this one." He picked Emma up and carried her into the formerly soothing white living room, now a tumult of brightly-colored baby gear fighting it out with the lovely _objets d'art_ that the interior decorator had carefully selected long ago. The green changing station from Emma's all-but-abandoned bedroom loomed over everything else from the corner.

As he headed out of the breakfast nook, Lizzy could see that Will wasn't holding Emma's head quite right, and that he'd left behind the butterfly toy, which Emma liked to play with when she was having a change. Lizzy opened her mouth to say something, but she stopped herself just in time before any corrections or suggestions could slip out. The journey of a thousand miles began with a single step.

* * *

The longer they talked, the more the rightness of resigning began to settle on Lizzy. And it was largely a _feeling_, or at least it wasn't all rational thought. There were practical reasons, yes, why it would be difficult to continue. And she was also well aware that if circumstances had been different, if money had been an issue, she would definitely have kept going to work and trying to make a go of it. But money _wasn't _an issue. She was miserable, exhausted, feeling like a failure, and it was what she and Emma needed for her to do. Still, it went against just about everything she'd built her life on to this point, and it scared her deep in her bones.

Sunday evening, after Emma fell asleep a little earlier than usual, Lizzy and Will both needed a break from their intense conversation. So she called her aunt Maddie from the living room while he fooled around on his computer in his study. She needed some advice from someone who had been in the trenches. She told Maddie what was going on and asked for her take on things.

"Oh, you poor thing," Maddie commiserated after hearing her story. "Isn't anyone taking care of _you_? Who's watching out for Lizzy?"

Lizzy suddenly felt tears coming on. "Nobody, I guess. I'm trying so hard, but I just can't do it all on my own."

"Of course you can't. Nobody can. Do you need me to come bail you out?"

"No, no. I'll be all right. I know how busy you are. Everyone is busy. My whole, you know, _village _is stretched to the limit all the time."

"And it sure doesn't help that you're not getting any support from your family. Or Will's, right? In all our dysfunctional splendor." Maddie had never come this close to directly criticizing either her husband's family or Will's before.

"No. But there's not much I can do about it."

"Unfortunately, no. Does Will not see what's going on, how hard a time you're having?"

"Maybe he's starting to, finally. You know, he sees everything from an economic point of view. Hire more help, and the problem is solved. I don't know. He's been making noises about wanting to be a better father, but I don't think he has figured out what that means to him. He doesn't seem to grasp that there's this whole other world of emotions and feelings involved in it."

"What the hell is wrong with these smart men? Don't they ever read any psychology?" Maddie very uncharacteristically began to mutter obscenities under her breath.

Lizzy chuckled a watery little chuckle. "What, you've heard this before? And no, Will only reads _The Economist _and _The Wall Street Journal_."

"Yes, of course, I hear it a lot in my family therapy practice. I really think we're at this tough place for men in our culture right now. Women have been in this spot forever, torn between family and work, and men, some men, anyway, are just starting to feel it, too, and they don't know how to deal with it. Well, never mind. You don't need a lecture about this right now."

"No, it's OK. It's only, I have this tough decision to make, and I—" she broke off. She wasn't sure what came next.

"Lizzy, what do you really need to feel better?"

"I need sleep. I need to spend time with Emma. She's freaking out. I'm freaking out. I need to work less, but I can't do that in my current job. So I think that means I need to quit my job."

"That sounds about right to me. Look, you've devoted your adult life up to now to trying to make the world a better place for other people. It's OK to take care of yourself and to make things better for yourself, too. Do what you need to do."

"And damn the consequences?" Lizzy felt a little panicked about this part.

"What are the consequences if you _don't _do it? You're going to fall apart, and there are too many people depending on you for you to let that happen. Most especially Emma."

Lizzy sighed. "OK, I see your point."

"And what about Will? What are you going to do there?" Maddie would never tell her directly what to do. Damn therapists.

"Well...I guess I have to figure out what I need, tell him what that is, and hope he can come through."

"All right. How will you present it? What words will you use?"

"Hmm. Will takes things best when they're, uh, when they sound rational, I guess. Dispassionate. And he takes some time to process things, and think about how he might change. So I think I need to be really matter-of-fact, and not expect immediate results, even though I might want them. And no yelling!" Five years of marriage had taught her that much. He just dug his heels in when she yelled.

"Good. See, you know all this."

"Ha. It's like pulling teeth, I know. You are just _that good_, Maddie. You're wonderful."

"The feeling is mutual. Look, I have to hit the hay. You OK now?"

"Yeah, much better. Thank you. I love you. Love to Uncle Ed and the girls, too."

"Love you, too. Kiss Emma and Will for me."

On the way in to see Will in the entertainment room, Lizzy caught sight of herself in a decorative mirror in the hallway. Her face was drawn in exhaustion and she had huge dark circles under her eyes. She couldn't see even a spark of the energy that had driven her so far so fast all her life. She couldn't go on like this, she knew. She moved away from the mirror as fast as she could.

* * *

By Monday, Christmas Eve, Lizzy had decided that she would definitely quit her job, although she still had fears and reservations about what the long-term consequences were going to be for her career. She said as much that evening to Will as they were walking around at Rockefeller Center so that Emma could enjoy the lights around the skating rink and the giant Christmas tree. Emma was in the baby carrier on Will's chest, and Lizzy was pushing around the stroller, empty except for the giant baby car seat perched precariously in it. The sidewalks were crowded, so it wasn't easy to navigate with all this stuff.

"Are you sure?" he asked again, as they stopped to look down at the skaters going around and around on the ice.

"Yeah, I think so. I have to admit I'm very worried, though. How will I get through a month more of working, even part time? What will a gap on my résumé say to a prospective employer? Am I going to get stuck on a mommy track? Is staying at home going to drive me crazy?"

"You still think it's what you want, though?"

"Yes. I feel like it's the best thing for me to do given the options I have."

"OK," Will nodded his agreement. "Then that's what we'll do. But this raises a question, and I really don't know the answer to it."

"Go ahead," she prompted when he didn't continue.

"Well, it seems to me that a lot of what we've been talking about the last few days is how to be more equal as parents. Isn't that right?"

"Yeah, in a nutshell."

"So, how are we going to do that if you're at home taking care of Emma, and I'm at the office all day? I don't see how that works out, exactly."

"I don't know, either. I think we'll have to feel our way through that."

"Lizzy, no," he protested, "That's just kicking the can further down the road again, and it's how we ended up right here in the first place."

She heaved a heavy sigh. "You're right, you're right. But I just don't know the answer. I don't know how we can talk about equality if we end up having a really extreme division of labor between us."

They turned away from the skating rink and walked along in silence for a few moments until they got to a vantage point where Emma could look down at the big gold statue of Prometheus bringing fire to humanity. She kicked and gurgled.

Lizzy went on, "Well, I guess one thing we can do is agree that the work we do at home is work, too, and it's something our family values."

"OK," he nodded. "What follows from that? Do you want to get paid for doing it?"

"Oh, come on. I'm serious."

"I'm being serious, too. If it's work, you should get paid, right?" Apparently Will's inner economics major was cutting loose, Lizzy thought.

"So you're going to pay me to do your domestic work, like a maid? No, thanks. What I want is, when you come home from work and I hand you Emma, you don't refuse to take her and say, 'I've been working all day, I need a break.' Because I'll have been working all day, too, and I'll need a break as well."

"All right. I'll do my best. But if you're not getting paid, what about the question of, um, financial independence? Before we got married that was really important to you."

"Yeah, it was. Is. That's a scary thing. And it does really freak me out to think about being totally financially dependent on you. It feels like we're turning the clock back 50 years, like _The Feminine Mystique_ never happened."

"OK, I see your point. But I don't...I mean, some of those concerns may not apply in our situation. Let's talk about what freaks you out specifically, in our specific situation."

They turned and faced the giant Christmas tree, all lit up with white lights. Emma seemed interested, and she looked at the lights with wide eyes for some time.

"Because...if something happens to you, or if you run off with your secretary—"

He chuckled, "Don't worry, I'm not going to run off with Ahmed, or anybody else."

"I don't know, he's pretty cute with those brooding dark eyes—"

"Oh, so you're the one who's going to run off with him, huh?" Will teased her. Ahmed wasn't running off with anyone. He and his husband Phil were the image of mutual devotion.

"Not likely. The point is that if you're out of the picture, for whatever reason, and my career is in freefall because I stopped working, where does that leave me financially?"

"According to the terms of our prenup and our will, it leaves you set for life. You know that." That was true. If he died, she inherited everything, and if they divorced, she still got more money than she could quite get her head around, especially now that Emma was alive. When they had been negotiating the prenup, she had argued it was too generous, but he had insisted.

"Yeah, you're right. I just worry, I guess. Anyway, my salary is so insignificant compared to your income that I'm basically living off you already. On my own I'd never have been able to afford 90% of the things we do together."

"I wish you'd stop looking at it that way. We're married! It's yours now, too."

"I know, I know. Well, I guess I'm OK with the financial thing, then. I still think there's more to this, symbolically, though. It's not just a financial question. Why is it me, the woman, who's giving up her career, and not you, the man? I know I said before that this time I'd just take one for the team, you know, and not sleep or whatever, so that you could go to work. But when are _you _going to take one for the team? Are we going to alternate somehow? Or what?"

He looked taken aback. "You mean like, I'll take the hit on baby number two? Or we'll alternate every other week or month or something?" _Impossible_, his expression seemed to say.

"Well, then, why does it always have to be me? That is deeply, deeply unequal." She was very careful to say this in a calm, rational voice.

"Umm..."

"If you say it's because I'm the girl, the _woman_, I'm going to...I don't know what, but something awful. And don't say it's because I earn less, or because I have less responsibility, or whatever. Then we'd have to talk about why all that is."

"And you're saying...?"

"All roads lead to gender. And maybe class. That's what I'm saying. You know it's true."

"Can't we just look at this objectively, as just the two of us, without bringing in all this, uh, _structural _stuff?" Apparently he didn't want to say the "F" word, _feminism_. God forbid.

"No, we can't. Because it's all there, all the time. Look at it this way. What job could I _possibly _have that would be so important that you'd quit yours to raise our kid? President? Anything less than that, and there's always going to be some reason it's better for you to keep working, not me. Your job will always be more important, less flexible, earn more money...Oh, wait, you earn way more than the president, so never mind that!"

Naturally, this pissed him off. He put his hands on his hips, which made Emma squeal with delight and kick her legs. "So, what exactly do you want me to do?"

"I want you to think about it. Examine it. Decide whether you're ever, _ever _going to take one for the team. OK, enough with the sports metaphors. Whether you are _ever _going to put your career second, behind the good of our family. And, whether you can _ever _put my career before yours."

"Lizzy, the company is my _patrimony_. I don't think you understand that."

That was a good one, thought Lizzy, laughing ironically to herself. So true. "That's an interesting choice of words. Puts a whole new spin on things."

"What do you mean?" he asked crossly.

"It's a nice metaphor for this thing passed down from father to son. Patriarchy. Duty and responsibility and honor-thy-father, all diametrically opposed to any insignificant airy-fairy stuff like love and feelings, of course."

"Hmm, well, if you want to put it that way—" He was just working up a good head of steam when he stopped, and said no more. He turned away.

Lizzy took a step toward him. "Don't go all grave and silent on me again."

Emma squawked to let him know she wanted to turn back to see the lights. To soothe her, he did turn back, which left him facing Lizzy again, as much as he apparently didn't want to.

Eyes downcast, he said "I just don't see why you have to make such a big deal about this and turn it into a big theoretical thing."

"Because it matters to me, that's why. And I hope it matters to you, too. You have a daughter now, and if you can't or won't understand this gender stuff for _my _sake, at least try to do it for her. The choices we make now create the world she's going to grow up in."

He thought about this for a moment. "All right. I'll think about your question, the one about if there's any circumstance where I might quit my job. I don't know the answer. I don't know who I'd be without it."

"What, and _I_ don't feel that way?"

"OK, OK, point taken."

They stood again in silence for some time. Emma fussed again, so they walked back over to the side of the skating rink to watch the ice skaters go round and round.

Finally, Lizzy said, "Anyway, changing gears here, my other big concern is Elena."

Will asked, perplexed, "What about her? Aren't you happy with her so far? I thought you were."

"Yeah, I am. She's great. But what's up with you two? Did you have some kind of an argument the other night?"

"Well...let's just say she was not very pleased with me when I walked in the door. I didn't think that was very professional," he said with a little sniff.

"Will, we made her miss a special dinner with her family."

"Oh." Now he sounded embarrassed.

"We can't just ask her to stay late like that, with no warning. She's hourly, not like your staff at work, and part of the reason she wanted the job was that it ended at 6. We have to have some kind of backup system to fill in the gap between 6 and whenever we get home. Especially since I'm going to have to travel again, even when I'm working part-time in January. Anyway, the real issue is, when I stop working altogether, aren't we going to have to let Elena go?"

They debated this for some time. Lizzy's reasoning was that if she were going to be at home full time, what did she need a nanny for? She wanted to be all in. Will disagreed. If they'd learned anything from the previous weeks, he said, it was that she needed sleep and breaks, and having Elena's help would let her do that.

"I don't need a nanny if I'm going to be staying home! Taking care of Emma is going to be my job. I don't want to be some kind of lady of leisure like those women at the club. I just can't do that. I need something to do, and, as I keep telling you, I think there are some things that people have to do for themselves."

"Please, give it a rest with that! Why are you so hung up on this idea that it's not OK to pay people to help you?"

"Because there have to be limits! Look, I understand how you were raised, or at least I think I do. But you have to make a little space here for my...middle-class values, or something, OK? Doing things for yourself. It's what you _do_. I feel like it's part of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. I mean, obviously _you _work very hard, but there's not a lot of bootstrapping going on, right?"

"OK, yes, but you're already, umm, bootstrapped now, so what's the point? I don't get it."

"The point is that there is still something of value in that to me, OK? But anyway, that's kind of a minor part of it, I think. The other thing is that I want to do better than Mom."

"Well," said Will, dismissively. He still wouldn't criticize Lillian directly, but his "well" was laden with meaning—"of course," and "obviously," and "gee, I sure hope so."

"I know, duh. I think that both Jane and I are trying to make up for that in one way or another. Mom's always been like that. She's all about the house, and her art and stuff. When Jane and I and Mary were little, she was a little more, I don't know, _present_, but things got bad after Lydia was born."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I think she was never really into young kids, so maybe she was relieved when we got a little older. And then Lydia came along kind of unexpectedly when I was about ten. I think it was too much for her. She seemed to lose interest completely in the whole parenting thing. Maybe it was post-partum depression or something. But anyway, she kind of turned inward after that, and into this, well, huge narcissist, like she is now. We were on our own in so many ways. Honestly, I think Jane kind of overcompensates by trying to be the perfect mother. I don't want to be like that, but I want to be there for my kid. Being there, physically and emotionally—that's really important to me. Do you see that?"

"Yeah, OK. I think that's a pretty rational response to her behavior."

Annoyed, Lizzy snapped, "It's more than 'rational,' it's important psychologically. It's what kids need to grow up healthy and whole. It's called love."

Will gave her a funny look. "Love can be expressed in a lot of different ways. I mean, I knew that my mother loved me, even though I didn't spend a lot of time with her, and even though she didn't say it in so many words."

Lizzy sighed, exasperated. "But you like to hear me say it now, don't you? And you tell me and Emma you love us all the time. You seem to see some value in that."

"Yeah, sure. But there are cultures where you never say 'I love you,' and everyone seems to be fine."

"Oh, come on! Look, here's my point. One of mom's things, or maybe something that happened because she didn't want to do it all herself, was how important it was for us to learn how to take care of ourselves. If you're not taking care of yourself, you're not pulling your weight in the household. It's part of working hard and being a good person."

"I'm confused, if you think that's so important. There's a lot of housework you farm out already. And it sure doesn't look like your dad does anything to pull _his _weight in the household."

That got her dander up. "First of all, _we _farm it out. Housework is not _my _thing."

"OK, all right." He backed off from that third rail fast.

She calmed down and continued, "But, otherwise, you're right. I think...like I said, it's a question of values. I _have _rejected a lot of what my mom taught me, and I know I don't do most of the stuff that she made us learn to do: cook, clean, garden. And you're right about my dad. So, I guess that all of this is actually more about being a good _woman _than about being a good _person_. I'm really bad at doing all that womanly stuff and honestly that makes me feel, um, embarrassed, and deficient sometimes."

"But why? You do all this other great stuff! You're totally amazing."

"Well, I just...I sort of feel like maybe I can let the housework stuff go, even if it makes me feel kind of inadequate, but if I completely give my child over to someone else to take care of, I am a complete failure as a woman and a mother." She paused. "There you have it. Simple as that."

All business, he said, "Wow, you see, I just wouldn't look at it that way. To me, there's, you know, just so much work to be done, and you distribute it to the different members of the team to get it done. There's no emotional attachment involved."

"I know. And the less housework or caregiving _you _do, the more manly you are. It's not fair. But don't you see, taking care of the baby is all about emotional attachment? That's what we're supposed to be doing, creating emotional attachments with her. Nobody loves her more than we do, nobody. That's why taking care of her is _not _just another chore. Maybe this isn't rational, but it's how I feel."

He looked perplexed again. "OK. I didn't understand that before. I'm not sure I know what to do with that. What does that mean we should do, especially with Elena?"

"I don't know. But the other thing is that Elena is great, and I really don't want to let her go. If I do go back to work eventually, I hope she'll still work for us. It would be really great for Emma to have one caregiver all along. That's what the studies say is best."

Will thought about this for a bit. "All right. Then, how about this: we'll ask her to stay on, but you can ask her to work on a limited basis, to come over when you need her."

Lizzy protested, "But we hired her on a year-long contract, and we have to pay her for three months full-time no matter what if we break the contract before then."

"Right. We'll pay her to work full time, but she'll come in when you need her."

"That's ridiculous! What a waste of money."

Will threw his hands up in the air. "Lizzy, we have enough. It won't even make a dent. We could pay her to do nothing for the whole year, just basically be on reserve until you want her help, and that would still be a good use of our money. You have to quit fighting this. We have a _lot _of money, and we can use it however makes most sense for us."

She knew that. The money gave them the freedom to do what they wanted, and she had certainly enjoyed spending some of it, in moderation, on travel and eating out and that kind of thing. But it also made her feel ashamed sometimes, and definitely undeserving, when she saw how little other people had, especially people who were working really hard for it. She hated that it put barriers between her and Charlotte, and between her and her parents. She tried to give it away whenever she could.

She also knew that she should have gotten over this a long, long time ago. She had been able to push it aside and not think about it when it had just been the two of them, working like more or less normal people. But she really had to face up to it now. The money had been part of her life since she had decided to be with Will, since she had abandoned her old way of life to move in with him. It was about time she accepted the money and really started to think through what they could do with it, rather than trying to pretend it wasn't there. Talk about a First World problem! Oh, no! I have too much money! God.

So she took a deep breath and said, "OK. I see what you're saying. This makes me uncomfortable. The, um, _opulence _of our life still makes me uncomfortable. I have to admit that. It's not how I was brought up, and I hope you'll appreciate that. But I can see how this will solve some problems for us. I'll talk to Elena about it and see if we can work something out."

She paused and then went on, "Actually, _we _should talk with Elena about it. We have to do this together. You need to fix your relationship with her, and we all need to be on the same page about this if she's going to be such an important part of Team Emma."

"All right. I'll try."

"I'm cold, and I bet Emma is, too. Shall we head back?" He agreed, and they threaded their way through the crowd toward Fifth Avenue to find a cab home. Lizzy only gave four or five people flat tires by accidentally rolling the stroller up the heels of their shoes.

* * *

Tuesday was Christmas. Lizzy and Will were exhausted from the intense talking of the previous three days, but as planned they headed out in the late morning to Westchester to see Jane and Charlie. They picked up Lydia and Susanna from their place in Brooklyn on the way. They were in the hybrid SUV because it was their only vehicle big enough to hold all the presents, plus all the baby gear that even a one-day trip apparently required. Will had wanted to buy the Porsche Cayenne hybrid (21 mpg—what the hell kind of hybrid was that?) and she'd wanted the Toyota Prius V (40 mpg—but so downmarket!), so they'd compromised on a Lexus (about 30 mpg).

Will had really gone overboard with Christmas this year, in Lizzy's opinion. Besides all the frilly dresses he'd bought for Emma, he had also purchased loads of toys and books for her, in anticipation of watching her eyes light up with joy on this, her very first Christmas! He just couldn't wait! He'd even bought a new iPhone with the best possible camera so he could document it all. Lizzy was more sanguine about it. Emma was still barely focusing her eyes, so Lizzy doubted she'd get too excited about anything, plus it wasn't like she would remember any of this anyway.

Lizzy had argued that they should only have presents for the kids that year, because Lydia and Susanna had so much less money than the other families. She was afraid that Lydia and Susanna might feel obliged to buy gifts they couldn't afford, and that it would all be awkward and uncomfortable. But Will wouldn't hear of it. That would be so tacky, he had said. Lizzy had told him she didn't have time to shop for so many people, so he'd said he'd take care of it.

Of course what that meant in the end was that Will had had Ahmed hire a personal shopper. Will asked her to buy some nice hand-made wooden toys for Aiden and Tyler, and also whatever tasteful, expensive things she thought were appropriate for the other grownups based on a short questionnaire he had filled out. Lizzy, on the other hand, had only managed one item of shopping. She had sneaked off to her computer on Saturday to buy Will some gold cufflinks. She had taken a look at what they had on Amazon, quickly realized that wouldn't do, and ended up buying something from Tiffany's. They'd arrived via Fed Ex on Monday. The whole thing took 11 minutes, and that was the sum total of the Christmas cheer and energy that she could summon this year.

On the ride to Westchester, Lydia sat in front and made Will laugh with her comments about the kamikaze drivers on the parkway. She also talked about the big project she'd been working on, the one that took up all her time and had kept her from offering Lizzy much help. She felt bad about it, she said, but what could she do? She was a freelancer, and she had to take what work she could get when she could get it so she could pay the rent. Lizzy and Susanna, who loved babies, sat in the back and tried to keep Emma, resplendent in her red velvet dress with big black bows, from screaming quite so loudly in her much-despised car seat.

Susanna was a computer programmer in her late twenties. She and Lydia had met at a mutual friend's art opening, and they'd dived right into something serious immediately. Lydia, who was now 24, was definitely the wild one in their relationship, but she had toned things down considerably since her days in art school. She thrived on sitting back and making detached, acerbic, spot-on observations about the things and people around her, while Susanna laughed till she cried at the comments and made generous allowances for people's shortcomings and foibles. Lizzy thought their shtick was interesting to watch, and also was amused at how well Will's dry sense of humor complemented Lydia's more out-there sensibility. She never would have predicted that the two of them would hit it off back when they'd first met. You never could tell with in-laws.

By the time they got to Jane and Charlie's, Lizzy's ears were ringing from Emma's howls, so it was a relief to stumble out of the car and toward the house. As usual, the outside looked like it had been hosed down with Christmas lights. The inside, on the other hand, looked as if someone had dumped a truckload of gilded, distressed-wood, antique Country French Christmas decorations all over it and then sprinkled them all with fairy dust and snow. Jane and Charlie were very, very big fans of Christmas. Naturally it was all perfect in every way.

Aiden and Tyler, decked out in precious little suits, had just waked up from their naps when the visitors arrived, shouts of 'hello' and 'Merry Christmas' echoing loudly in the huge entryway. Aiden hid behind Jane's leg sucking his thumb and stared, apparently afraid of Lydia's spiky black hair with magenta tips. 100% organic pacifier in his mouth, Tyler staggered over to Will and held up his arms to be lifted up and tossed in the air. This was their special game.

Lizzy thumped the car seat down and unbuckled Emma as fast as she could to stop the yelling. When she reached under Emma to take her out, she discovered that, once again, Emma's cloth diaper had leaked. The red velvet dress was ruined. The car seat cover was soaked. "Shit!"

"Lizzy!" Jane scolded. "Not in front of the kids!"

"Sorry, sorry," Lizzy said, clapping her hands over Emma's ears too late. "I'm going to need to throw the cover and her dress in the washer, OK?"

"Oh, of course, here, let me," said Jane, bustling over to take care of things while Lizzy headed for the nursery to wrestle Emma out of her sopping finery. Emma spent the rest of the day in a white romper with green ducks on it.

When she came back into the living room with Emma over her shoulder, Lizzy saw Aiden eyeing a sideboard that had a big display of luscious, ripe-looking grapes and apples and pears in a large wooden bowl surrounded by cotton snow, and big antique wooden nativity scenes on either side. Lizzy knew that the fruit was made out of wood, too, because it had bits of gold leaf and paint on it, but she wasn't sure Aiden did. She wondered what kept him from eating the fruit or yanking the table runners off or knocking down the Christmas tree in this immaculate, perfectly ordered house. An electric fence of some kind? As soon as he saw her looking at him, he turned away and went to play with his blocks in the corner.

Jane had prepared a delicious mid-day meal for them. It was a beautiful roast leg of organic, humanely raised lamb—"lightly killed," quipped Lydia—with rosemary and new potatoes. It was all very healthful, of course, because Jane had used organic fat-free yogurt instead of sour cream, and sun this and soy that instead of butter, and it was completely sodium-free because the delightful herbs from her kitchen herb garden gave it all the flavor it needed. Somehow everything tasted fantastic, rather than like the cardboard it should have resembled.

"This is incredible, Jane," said Lizzy as she sampled the wonderfully caramelized roasted root vegetables. "This wasn't one of mom's recipes, was it?"

"No, no. I took a class. You know, I still use some of her techniques, but we just can't eat the way she and dad do."

Lydia turned to Susanna and said, "Butter. Cream. Heart disease."

"Techniques? What techniques?" asked Lizzy. "Mostly I just remember browning things in a stick or two of butter."

Jane said, "Oh, yeah, there was a lot more to it than that. She's a really serious cook, you know."

Cutting up her lamb, Lizzy said, "Yeah. I guess that's a lot of lost hours I spent not paying attention while she was trying to teach me something. And all the hours trying to teach me to clean, too."

Lydia laughed. "She'd given up on all of that by the time I came along. How do you think I had time to get into so much trouble? Compared to you two, I had it easy."

Susanna smiled and said, "Aha, I guess that's why you look at me so helplessly when I hand you the vacuum cleaner."

Charlie laughed. "Our mom never even bothered to try with me. She was just happy when I didn't track too much mud in the house. That's what it's like with boys, right, Will?"

Will chuckled what Lizzy recognized as his fake, uncomfortable chuckle. "Ha ha, right."

Still laughing, Charlie barreled onwards, oblivious. "I know for a fact from our days in Dunster House that you can't cook to save your life. I don't think that in the entire time I've known you I've ever seen you do anything that could possibly be construed as being housework. Just think of all the extra time that freed up for you!"

Will shot him a dirty look.

Lydia chimed in, "Right! Just imagine how much further in life Lizzy could have gotten if she hadn't had to spend all those hours learning to cook and clean! God, she'd be freaking president by now! She'd have taken over the world!"

Lizzy knew that Lydia was just joking around, but it struck her that what she'd said was true. Lizzy had spent hours of her childhood doing household chores, and Will had gotten to spend those same hours fooling around, going sailing, playing squash, learning how to rule the world. Charlie, too. Man.

A little defensively, but trying to hide it, Will said, "I _do _stuff. I take care of Emma."

"Yes, he does. He's the diaper-changing champ," Lizzy confirmed, squeezing his hand.

Charlie laughed. "I don't know how to do any of that stuff. I just leave it all to Jane. I don't know what I'd do without her." He smiled at her affectionately.

"Well, a lot more cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the kids, apparently," said Lydia acerbically, taking a sip of her sparkling water. They were all drinking sparkling water in deference to Lydia's sobriety.

"You should talk, Lydia, the Takeout Queen," smiled Susanna. "Every couple has their way of working these things out. We all find a way to manage."

Lizzy supposed that was true. But she was pretty sure she wouldn't be happy for very long with how Jane and Charlie had divided things up. Still, that was their choice, and they seemed happy enough with it.

Conversation turned to Charlie's family. He told them that Caroline was spending the holiday at home with her husband and child, and Louisa and Gil had decided to head off someplace warm to shake off the winter blues.

Jane said, "Also, Caroline is recovering from some minor surgery she recently had, and she's not ready for company."

"Really? I hope she's OK. It wasn't anything serious was it?" asked Susanna, who had never met Caroline.

Jane cleared her throat before replying, "Well, as I understand it, one of her cheek implants, um, became displaced, and she had to have it, uh, re-anchored? Isn't that what she said, Charlie? I think it caused some, uh, discoloration."

"Right," agreed Charlie happily, "and I think she decided to take advantage of the situation by having a, uh, what do you call it, an eye tuck? An eye bob? at the same time."

Lydia snickered and Lizzy heard her whisper to Susanna, "Caroline is the horror that is heterosexuality."

Lizzy hoped that Charlie, down at the other end of the long table, hadn't overheard, but privately she really had to agree with Lydia.

* * *

At the end of the meal, Lizzy and Susanna followed Jane into the kitchen and helped her wash up while Will took Emma and Charlie did something manly with the boys. When Susanna left the room to go get some more of the dirty dishes, Lizzy said, "Jane, I have something to tell you." And she told Jane that she'd decided to leave HRI.

Her own hand covered in soap suds, Jane grabbed Lizzy's hand and said, "Are you sure, sweetie? It's a big decision."

"Yeah. It was just too much, with Emma not sleeping. I couldn't make it work."

Jane nodded and went back to the dishes. "I know. I thought about that a lot when I was pregnant with Aiden. I didn't see how I could make it as a lab scientist and still see my baby. So I decided not to go back to work after my maternity leave. That, and I had such a short maternity leave, because the lab's grant didn't cover it. Anyway, I'd rather watch my kids grow up in real life than study other peoples' kids in a lab setting. This is much more fun."

"You're happy with your choice, then." Lizzy said this with certainty as she dried off one of the crystal wine glasses.

"Oh, yeah. Definitely the right thing for _me_." She didn't say it, but the way she raised her eyebrows told Lizzy she had her doubts about whether it would be the right thing for Lizzy.

Susanna came back into the room, so Lizzy decided to lighten the mood.

"Well, we'll see. Anyway, the most important thing is to try to get Emma to sleep. That's going to get us all more back on track, I think."

Jane laughed and shook her head. "Well, you know, they always say that the smart ones don't sleep."

Lizzy rolled her eyes and said, "Then I guess Emma must be a fucking genius."

Susanna looked confused, but Jane smiled beatifically and kept on scrubbing.

After everything was washed and put away, they all went back out to the high-ceilinged living room to open presents. Charlie pulled the gifts out one-by-one from under the two-story-high tree groaning under its heavy load of ornaments, and everyone watched as each gift was opened and appreciated in turn. Jane had, as usual, bought scads of thoughtful gifts for everyone, and Will's personal shopper had, it seemed to Lizzy, gone totally nuts on their behalf.

"Oh, thanks, it's really cool," Lydia said when she opened her gift of an obviously very expensive sterling silver...something. It was swirly and arty and the size of her fist. Was it jewelry? Was it a paper weight? She looked at Lizzy, who shrugged and grimaced. Whatever it was, it would probably have paid Lydia's art studio rent for the month.

"Look at the tag. It's a Fleming," explained Will, naming a New York artist who worked in metal.

"Fantastic, thanks," answered Lydia a little tightly. So that's what it was, _art_!

Later, when the others opened the gifts from Lydia, really interesting abstract black-and-white photos of the city that she'd taken and framed herself, Lizzy thought Lydia looked apologetic that that was all there was.

Lizzy scooted over on the floor next to Lydia and gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. "Thank you. I love it. I'm going to put it up in our hallway so I can see it whenever I come in the door." And then she whispered in Lydia's ear, "I'm sorry about the silver thingy. I didn't know what it was. Will was in charge of gifts this year."

Lydia whispered back with a smile, "Don't worry about it. Fleming is a hack. I'm already thinking about how I can sell it and use the money for this awesome new installation I'm working on."

Lizzy grinned at her. "Great. I'm glad it was just what you wanted."

* * *

Lizzy and Will dropped off Susanna and Lydia at their place. On the way home from Brooklyn, Lizzy sat in the back seat watching Emma follow the lights flashing by out the back window. "Well that was interesting, as usual."

"Yeah, but fun," said Will. "Better than what the stiffs in my family do for the holidays. Dinner at a hotel or something."

"Yeah, I could see that." She thought about it for a while.

"Quite a display of feminine prowess, don't you think?" she asked.

"What do you mean?" he asked, turning onto Fifth Avenue.

"The meal, the decorations, the Christmas pudding with the Frozen Charlotte dolls in it. The whole shebang."

"Well, that's Jane's thing, right?"

"Yeah, Jane's thing. Just don't expect me to turn into Martha Stewart even if I'm a full-time mom, OK?"

He laughed. "I would never presume," he said, stopping in front of their building and shutting off the engine. The doorman came out to help them unload the car.

Lizzy laughed, too. But she also wondered, what other kind of full-time mom could she be? She could never be like Jane, and she didn't want to be like her mother, at least the way she was now. But she didn't know what that left her with. She'd just have to find out for herself.

That night as as they lay together in bed in each other's arms, she felt his chest rumble as he said, "It's back to work tomorrow. I—how—what do you need me to do, to do differently, now? Specifically."

She whispered, "I need you to be there for us."

"OK," he replied, his voice very soft. "OK. I'll talk to Ahmed about my schedule."

* * *

The next day, Wednesday, Lizzy went to work as usual. Before she left, she asked Elena if they could have a chat at the end of the day to talk about a change of plans. After lunch, she turned in her letter of resignation, accepting Ian's offer to reduce her workload to half-time, effective January 1, as she phased out over the next month. During that time, she would come to the office from 10 to 3:30, and she wouldn't take on any new projects.

She called a group meeting and told her staff about her plans. They listened, stunned.

"I'm sorry," said Lizzy, wiping her eye surreptitiously, "I know I haven't been pulling my weight since I came back to work. You don't know how much I regret that. And I'm sorry that all of this is going to make things difficult for all of you and slow things down, with so much uncertainty in the organization. I'm not sure exactly how my position can actually be cut back to half time, and I'm afraid it's probably going to mean a lot more stuff for you to do, Kyle. Again, I'm so sorry. What we do here is so important, and I feel terrible walking away with so much still left to do. I just can't go on like this."

Gina said, "Lizzy, I'm sorry, I had no idea. I really thought that if anybody could make it work, it would be you. Don't worry about us, we'll be fine."

Lizzy thought they probably would be, but she wasn't so sure about herself.

* * *

_Footnotes:_

(1) Festivus is a parody holiday, "the festival for the rest of us," from the TV show "Seinfeld." Festivus traditions include putting up a festivus pole, which is just a plain, bare aluminum pole; a Festivus dinner during which everyone is expected to participate in a ritual called the Airing of Grievances wherein they complain about how everyone has let them down in the previous year; and Feats of Strength, in which the head of the household wrestles people at the dinner until he or she is pinned, thus ending the holiday for that year.

* * *

_Well, not a lot of solutions yet, but the grievances have been aired at last. Please drop me a line below if there's something you'd like to add to the discussion._


	9. Chapter 9

_A/N: Thanks as always to my betas, Jan, Barbara, and Alison._

* * *

**Chapter 9**

**late December 2013**

Lizzy stumbled her way through the last two days of that week and the following Monday working full time. During the weekend in between, Will took Emma out for a couple of hours each afternoon so Lizzy could sleep and work. He was trying, she could see.

On Saturday, Will's cousin Richard and his wife Eleanor came to visit. They had spent Christmas with her family in Ohio and had decided they needed to say hello to Emma before heading back to Washington.

When Lizzy opened the door for Richard and Eleanor, at first all she could see was a mountain of Christmas presents where people should have been. But two people were indeed under these piles of wrapping and bows, and they came bursting through the door, a whirlwind of exclamations and greetings and kisses. Within seconds they had handed over the gifts, all for Emma, including an unwrapped life-sized stuffed gorilla, held Emma, blown bubbles on her tummy, helped themselves to something to drink in the kitchen, and begun a tag-team recounting of some outrageous goings-on on the Hill. They were notorious in certain circles for their energetic, risqué, and always scandalous tales.

All the while Lizzy and Will stood, a little stunned, where the foyer met the living room.

Richard said, "And so that's when the Speaker asked him, 'So _this _iswhat you wanted the House Gallery for? My God, man!'"

"No! No! You forgot the best part!" Eleanor broke in, gesturing wildly. She had different sources of gossip from his. "He was wearing a Peter Pan hat when he opened the Gallery door! And he had a quiver of arrows on his back! Can you believe that? An actual _quiver full of arrows_, in the _House Gallery_!"

"Oh, right, I forgot that part," Richard nodded. "So then the Capitol police had to chase this whole gang of strippers dressed in Tinkerbell costumes right down the Capitol steps..."

"And there was an alligator, too! On a leash!"

"Thank God Emma can't understand what they're saying," Will leaned over and whispered to Lizzy.

"Not as far as _you _know," Lizzy whispered back, as Emma's eyes moved intently back and forth between her aunt and uncle.

They had some Chinese food delivered and sat in the living room eating off the coffee table while Emma lay on the floor on her baby gym and batted at the little animals dangling down from above. While Eleanor and Lizzy talked about mutual acquaintances in Washington, Richard got a serious look on his face and took Will aside.

"I thought I should tell you as soon as I could. Georgie called me yesterday," Richard said in a low voice.

This was big news. Will hadn't heard from Georgie for almost three years after a terrible, terrible phone conversation. She had sounded really bad. She had said she was still in Los Angeles, still crashing on friends' sofas or living in the guest houses of friends of friends, and she needed money. He had, as usual, refused to release any additional funds unless she agree to go into rehab, which she still hadn't been ready for. She had sworn she would never talk to him again, which probably explained why she had contacted Richard instead of him this time. Now, all these years later, Will knew she was alive because she was still signing for her quarterly trust fund allowance payments, but she hadn't asked for any extra money since the last time they'd talked.

Will sighed and looked down at his discarded chopsticks and bowl on the coffee table. "What did she want?"

"Well, she didn't say. But she did ask if I'd meet with her. She's in the city for the weekend."

"Did she say where she's been living?"

"She says she's been staying in friends' guest houses in the Hamptons for a while," Richard said dismissively.

"God. Like Kato Kaelin or something," derided Will.

"Who?" Richard was puzzled.

"You know, that guy who lived in O.J. Simpson's guest house...? Oh, never mind." Will laughed. Richard was always on top of the latest political gossip, but he was hopeless when it came to celebrities.

"Well, anyway, I agreed to meet her for coffee tomorrow afternoon before we head back to Washington. I'll let you know what she says."

The next day, Richard called to let Will know how his coffee with Georgie had gone. Strangely, she wasn't asking for anything. It seemed that she was just interested in re-establishing contact.

When Will reported this to Lizzy as they were sitting on the sofa in the living room, she asked, "What do you think it all means?"

Will heaved a big sigh, which he seemed to do a lot when he talked about Georgie. "I don't know. Maybe nothing, or maybe she's working on some new angle."

"What are you going to do?"

"Nothing. Just wait and see what happens, I guess."

Lizzy put her arms around Will and held him. She didn't know what else to do.

* * *

Monday evening, New Year's Eve, they went to Charlotte and Liam's place in Brooklyn to have dinner and ring in the new year. Lizzy had convinced Will to knock off work early, so they arrived at around 7 o'clock.

Charlotte and Liam and their daughter Chloe lived on one floor of a brick rowhouse in Windsor Terrace. It had been pretty run-down when they bought it, which was the only reason they'd been able to afford it. So, construction permit permanently affixed to the front window, they'd spent the last five years tearing it up and re-doing it themselves a room at a time. They were currently working on making a decent-sized playroom for Chloe out of one tiny room and a closet by knocking down a wall between them. As a result, there were sheets of plastic hanging in doorways to keep the dust down, a sledgehammer and a giant container of spackle just inside the front door, and various other signs of construction everywhere. Will looked askance at these items when they walked in, until Lizzy glared at him and he snapped out of it.

Charlotte told them it would be a few minutes till dinner, and she, Lizzy, Chloe and Emma went into the kitchen to finish things up. Chloe, who was now three, had a little play kitchen in there, and she banged around some pots and pans while Charlotte started to boil water for the pasta.

Will and Liam had nothing in common, but they had now known each other for long enough that they had found a few safe topics of conversation. Will asked Liam about one of them, namely what art project he was currently working on, and they headed to the back of the flat to Liam's art studio. He was carving something out of a chunk of old telephone pole using a chainsaw.

"What can I do?" Lizzy asked Charlotte, "Do you want me to slice the bread or something?"

"Yeah, sure, if you can do it without cutting Emma's arm off. Liam cooked most of this," Charlotte said, gesturing at a big pot of red sauce bubbling away and some sausages frying gently in a skillet. "I'm just doing the pasta."

"Oh, is he still doing most of the cooking, then?"

"Yeah, we had a long negotiation about that. I do all the daycare pickups and dropoffs, and it really wears me out. Plus we eat too late if I cook after I get home. So finally I told him that his choices were: A. start doing the cooking, or B. eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every night because I'm too tired to cook." Charlotte made a face and Lizzy laughed, but she also felt acutely how lucky she was that she and Will could avoid a lot of these struggles because they could afford to eat takeout all the time.

"That's great. He's a good guy," Lizzy said approvingly.

"Tell me if you still think so after you try the pasta," Charlotte smiled.

Lizzy pulled a serrated knife out of the knife block and started cutting up a baguette. "So, Charlotte, I have some kind of big news to tell you. I've decided to leave HRI."

Charlotte peeked under the pot lid to see if the water was boiling yet. It wasn't. "Really? I thought you were pretty happy there. Do you have something new lined up?"

"No. I guess that's really the big news. I'm going to take some time off from work to take care of Emma. I just couldn't do it, Charlotte. It was too hard."

Charlotte turned and glared at her, hands on her hips. "Oh, come on. You have all the money in the world, a supportive husband, and a full-time nanny, and it's _too hard_? I don't think you have any idea what the rest of us go through, just trying to get by. What the _hell_?"

Lizzy stopped cutting and glared back at her. "Yes, it's too _hard_. My damn baby needs me every damn minute, she never sleeps, I'm falling asleep all the time so I can't do my job, my job is eating me alive, and my supportive-in-theory husband is never around. _You _have no idea about _my _life, either."

Charlotte took a deep breath and looked more closely at Lizzy, who was pale and shaking. "OK," she said more calmly, "Please tell me about it." And Lizzy told her about the trip to Washington that had been the last straw. Charlotte nodded and said the right, compassionate things after that, but Lizzy couldn't forget the look on her face earlier that had said, _you rich, privileged whiner_.

Which reminded her, sooner or later she would have to tell Paula and the other women in the lawyers' support group about her decision, too. Damn it. So much judgment and condemnation from so many different directions, so little time.

They managed to pull it together enough to have a pleasant dinner. By 9:30, though, Lizzy was so exhausted that they decided to call it a night. She was at home and in bed giving Emma her midnight feeding when the ball dropped in Times Square.

* * *

Lizzy and Elena had had a long conversation one morning right after Christmas about the changes that were coming. Will had sat and listened, but he hadn't had much to add. Lizzy had explained that although she'd be working part-time during January, she would like Elena to come 8 to 6 as originally agreed. After that, when she had completely stopped working, they would need to discuss a different schedule, although Elena would still be paid for full-time work.

At first Elena had objected. She had said she wouldn't feel right taking their money if she weren't doing the job. But, she had said, she also needed a full-time position, implying that she'd have to quit if she weren't paid the full-time wage.

"Elena, we really, really want you to stay with us. Emma loves you, and I really appreciate everything you have done for us already. Let's think about it like being on call, OK? That means you get paid for being available when you're needed, not just for work that you do. Doctors do that all the time."

Elena had looked doubtful. "Well...would that mean you would just call me when you wanted me to come? I like to have a schedule, I like to plan things."

"Yeah, I can understand that. We'll work out a regular part-time schedule. Does that sound all right?"

Elena had raised her eyebrows as if to say, "Whatever, it's your money," but what she actually said was, "Yes, that sounds OK."

So, with Elena's full-time help, January flew by in a sort of haze for Lizzy. She was working from 10 to 3:30, as promised, finishing up old business. At the end of every day, she sneaked back into the apartment around 4 o'clock, slinked down the hall to the bedroom, slapped on her sleeping mask and jammed in her earplugs, and slept until Elena went home at 6 o'clock. This was definitely better than working full time, but she wasn't sure it would have been sustainable for much longer. Even if HRI had been willing to give her a longer-term part-time position, it might not have been a good outcome for anyone, HRI or her. As it was, the extra couple of hours of sleep was keeping her sleep deprivation from getting worse, but it wasn't getting better, either.

Just after the new year, she called her parents. Her dad answered the phone, and when she told him about her decision, Tom harrumphed, "What a waste of a good education." Then he handed the phone over to Lillian before Lizzy could get in a word edgewise. Not that she knew exactly what she would have said, anyway. In response to the news, Lillian said, "Well, good. I didn't want to say anything before, but a baby really belongs with her mother. I never thought it was the right thing for you to go back to work." Lizzy quietly smacked her forehead against the table for a while after that.

During January, she had to go down to Washington a couple of times, but Elena had made it clear she really couldn't stay late if Lizzy came home from her travels after 6. Elena suggested that maybe her niece, Gabriella, the one who lived with her, might be interested in some occasional work. She was a child development major and she loved kids. They met, Gabby seemed great, and it worked out well for all involved.

After their long days of talking around Christmas, Will seemed to be trying to make a contribution with household affairs. Most nights he was home by 7 so they could share Emma duty during dinner and bath time, and he had asked Ahmed to avoid scheduling weekend events whenever possible. But he looked stressed out, and little pained expressions on his face now and then gave Lizzy the feeling he was mostly doing all this because she wanted him to. When she tried to ask what was going on, he just told her he was doing his best given what was going on with all the projects at work. Still, she supposed that a spouse who cooperated with a low level of enthusiasm was better than one who didn't cooperate at all.

Charlotte called Lizzy in mid-January, and they patched things up, more or less. Lizzy didn't have time to see her in person. She figured their friendship would weather this storm, eventually, and in any case she didn't have the emotional energy to get worked up about it.

Finally, finally, the end of January came. Lizzy felt like she had been stumbling toward the finish line and only crossed it because it happened to be there when she fell down. Ian still hadn't found a replacement for her, but she couldn't worry about that. So, on the last Thursday in January, she cleared out her desk and took down her photos. Ahmed arranged for someone to come and pick up the boxes and send them home the next day. The staff had a little goodbye lunch for her, with cake and everything. She got a little teary as she made a brief farewell speech. She only barely restrained herself from saying, "Andrew, I think I'll miss you least of all."

On her way out the door for the last time, she handed over her laptop, keycard and keys to Gina. It all felt very final.

And so it was that at 3:45 she found herself out on the street with no obligations, no work for the evening, nowhere to be except home if she wanted. It was very, very weird. She took a taxi to the little tea shop close to home for a cup of peppermint tea, and sat staring, unseeing, at a photo of a Japanese zen rock garden on the wall next to her for a quarter of an hour or so. Then she picked up her breast pump in its briefcase-looking bag, her portfolio, and her purse, and walked the rest of the way home. Elena and Emma were out, so she fell asleep on the sofa, still in her suit, until they came home a little before 6.

And that was it. It had taken her 35 years to get here, but it only took one day to turn Lizzy Bennet, staff attorney at HRI, possible future White House Counsel, candidate for multiple positions at the State Department, into Lizzy Bennet, stay-at-home-mom.

* * *

The next day, Friday, was the first day of the new schedule. From now on, Elena would come on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons, and Lizzy would be with Emma the rest of the time.

Emma woke Lizzy up a little before 6 o'clock, rooting around for a breast. Lizzy rolled over and gave one to her. She could just make out Emma's face in the pre-dawn light, and it looked so little and perfect, eyes closed and mouth moving rhythmically. Lizzy was filled with love for this little creature. She also felt profound relief that today she didn't have to get up and go to work. They could take it easy today, feel things out, enjoy being together.

This was the first day of a new chapter in her life, she thought, smoothing her hand over Emma's sparse, soft hair. A new adventure. That was great. It was going to be fun to have the time to show Emma new things, and to watch her learn and grow instead of just hearing about it from Elena. She could hardly wait to get started.

Will took off for work as usual at a quarter to 9, and Lizzy and Emma waved goodbye to him at the door. It felt very strange to stand there and watch him go, knowing she wouldn't be doing the same thing herself.

Lizzy wished she could take it slow that morning and just hang around in the apartment, but she had to pick up the mess and get out by 9 so the housecleaners could do their job. Emma cried at the sound of the vacuum cleaner and at the smell of bleach, and Lizzy felt horribly embarrassed by the fact that the cleaners were doing the job that she should be doing herself but didn't want to do. So all told, it was the best thing to leave.

They headed out happily just before 9, Emma strapped to her chest and the enormous diaper bag leading the way from the stroller seat like a figurehead on a ship, headed to the tea shop a few blocks away. It was below freezing, so there wouldn't be any outside destinations today. They walked past the community center, and Lizzy was reminded she could now go to the mothers' group meeting there every Wednesday if she wanted.

And that made her think, how _did _she want to spend her time now? When she'd been home on her maternity leave, she had known it was a time-limited thing, and that had colored her approach. This was different now. She wasn't racing against some imaginary clock to get baby time in before she had to go back to work. Probably she'd need to pace herself with Emma or she'd wear herself out. Will had been right that having Elena's help would be a good thing. How would she spend her days? This was an interesting and fun thing to contemplate. She was used to having clear goals and deadlines and objectives, and to having the clear structure of a working day. Now her goals were general rather than specific, it seemed: making sure Emma was happy and safe, helping her grow into a well-adjusted, confident, compassionate, happy adult. It was strange.

So, what did other women who didn't do paid work do all day? She really didn't know. It was time she found out.

They got to the tea shop and, as usual, she ordered peppermint tea at the counter.

The woman behind the counter cooed at Emma and said, "I notice you always go for the herbal stuff. You're breastfeeding?"

Lizzy nodded. "Yeah, no caffeine allowed." She raised her eyes to the ceiling in mock despair.

The woman laughed. "Isn't it crazy? They don't let you eat or drink _anything _interesting in this country when you're pregnant or nursing. The poor little babies can't eat anything good, either."

"I know. No eggs, no honey, no nuts, nothing! I guess there must be some scientific reason for it," Lizzy said skeptically.

"Who knows," the woman said, shrugging. "My mother-in-law sent me a baby book from Japan, and all it said was, 'no alcohol or really chewy things like octopus for at least the first year.'"

Lizzy looked down at Emma. "Sorry, kid, no booze or octopus for another eight months. You'll just have to suffer in silence till then."

They settled in at the table by the photo of the zen rock garden again. Emma was almost four months old now and she was doing pretty well holding her head up, so Lizzy tried putting her in the wooden high chair that she'd dragged over to the table. Emma wasn't having it, though, so back into Lizzy's arms she went. There would be plenty of opportunity to try again later. Anyway, it was time for her to eat, so Lizzy held Emma on her lap and nursed her. Emma's little arm flailed around in the air until she fell asleep and Lizzy could finally drink her tea safely.

Now that she had a minute to think, Lizzy tried to look at her situation objectively. What was she going to need to thrive without the daily structure of work and the social world it had provided her? One thing was, she needed to be around other people. She enjoyed that, and it wasn't going to happen sitting around in the apartment. There wasn't a ready-made community for her to walk right into in the building, either, since the other residents were all rich elderly widows, washed-up TV actors, young socialites, wrinkly old leather-clad rock stars, and other assorted people with loads and loads of money. Unfortunately, she didn't have any friends who were staying home with their kids, so she didn't have a social group to fall back on or people to ask for ideas. Oh, right! the mothers' group, they would be a good resource. She'd have an appointment every Wednesday morning, and might make some new friends there, more than just the passing acquaintances they'd been during her maternity leave. Good. What till Wednesday, then?

She pulled out her phone and searched for...what, exactly? Family activities? Mommy-baby something? There were so many results she didn't know where to start.

Jane! She would know. Jane always took a lot of classes with her kids, she remembered.

She called Jane speaking quietly so that she wouldn't wake Emma.

"Hi, Jane. I'm calling you from a tea shop! How about that?"

"You're home today? Wow! That's a big step for you." Lizzy could hear Jane clanking some things around, presumably in the kitchen.

"Can you talk now?"

"Yeah, sure. The boys are napping." Of course they are, thought Lizzy.

"Emma's asleep right now, too. Can you believe she's almost four months old? Next week."

"Oh! That's right. Now you're just getting into all of the good stuff. So many interesting developmental milestones at this age." Jane proceeded to quiz Lizzy about whether Emma had started holding up her head, sitting by herself, getting any teeth, or rolling over by herself since they had last spoken three days before. Lizzy started to worry when the answer was no to all of those things, but Jane assured her that that was well within expected parameters.

"So," Jane said, "You can start introducing solid foods. That's fun. What are you planning to feed her? All organic stuff, I hope."

"Well, I guess I was thinking I'd start with some rice cereal, and some yogurt. Maybe mashed bananas. The book said that was OK."

"You have to get the organic stuff! You don't know what kind of pesticides are on the other foods. No genetically modified foods, either, of course. Babies' brains are developing really rapidly, and so you don't want to introduce any contaminants into Emma's system, or you could damage her cognitive capabilities irreversibly. Oh, and if you give her rice cereal and bananas, she'll get constipated. So here's what you should do—"

Jane gave her a long list of the foods she needed to feed Emma, and in what order to introduce them. They all had to be made at home, with organic fruits and vegetables and grains, with a special food processor that Jane recommended. It was a piece of cake to put the food in these special little jars it came with once you had peeled, chopped, cooked, mashed, strained, and whipped the fruits and vegetables!

"Well, I'll give it a try," Lizzy replied, a little doubtful. That seemed like an awful lot of work.

"So, Jane, I was thinking," she continued, "I was thinking about stuff that Emma and I might be able to do together, you know, to get out of the house. I don't know what kinds of things are out there. Got any ideas?"

Jane told her about a website called Uptown Mommies that listed all kinds of activities and get-togethers and classes for moms and kids. She had found out about a lot of cool stuff to do with Aiden on that site before they had moved to Westchester.

"OK," Lizzy said. "What kind of classes?"

"Mommy-baby music, mommy-baby dancing, mommy-baby pottery..."

"Oh, be serious. I know you're making that last one up." Lizzy could just picture Emma jamming a big handful of clay into her mouth.

"No, no, it's true. OK, maybe the pottery class is for slightly older kids. Anyway, give it a try. They're nice people."

Lizzy took that bit with a big grain of salt because Jane thought that everyone was nice.

"Oh, I know!" said Jane. "I think I still have a guest pass for a mommy-baby yoga class at the maternity place where Aiden and I took some classes. I'll put the pass in the mail right now so you'll have it on Monday. I liked the teacher. Maybe you'll find some other moms to connect with there."

Lizzy thanked Jane and rang off.

Emma woke up needing a change, and enough time had passed that they could go back to the apartment, anyway. So they packed up, did a quick diaper change in the bathroom, and headed for home. She tried to look up the Uptown Mommies website on her phone as they walked. She had to put the phone away after she walked the stroller smack into a lamppost, but not before she had spotted the yoga class on the website. It looked all right. Maybe she would give it a try.

Just down the block from the tea shop was one of the expensive baby boutiques that Will liked to go to. In the shop window, she spotted the special baby food processor Jane had mentioned, so they stopped in and bought one. She was appalled at the cost, but Jane had said it was what she needed, so she got it anyway.

Elena came around 1 o'clock and took Emma into the living room to play, while Lizzy skulked off to the bedroom to put in her ear plugs and eye mask. She slept and slept and slept.

* * *

That Saturday, Lizzy went to a nearby organic grocery and bought some organic fruits and vegetables to make baby food. She opened up the food processor and set to work while Will, bemused at the whole thing, played with Emma. Including milk breaks, she spent six hours on it, peeling and chopping and cooking and straining and puréeeing, and all she got in the end was four little jars of strained carrots and four little jars of strained prunes. It was totally not worth it. She was definitely going to have to re-think some of Jane's other advice, too. She put the machine away in the kitchen cupboard and went down to the grocery store again to buy some baby food in jars. At least it was organic.

After all that work, she was too tired even to think about more cooking, so she also brought home dinner from the hot table at the grocery. It was some weird casserole that looked like it was made of sweet potatoes and quinoa and kale, maybe. Will wasn't very enthusiastic about it, but he was pretty happy with the organic vegan gluten-free flourless chocolate cake, at least until he found out what was and wasn't in it.

Lizzy thought she was probably supposed to be taking Emma out for exciting outings on the weekends, having playdates with friends, and the like. But she was still too tired. Next week, maybe. It was too cold out for outdoor activities, anyway. So for the rest of the weekend, she and Will stayed in and rested, napped, played with Emma, watched a little TV, and talked.

Emma delighted them by coming so, so close to rolling over onto her tummy on her own in her baby gym. She got that little leg over all right, but couldn't quite get her hips over. She was smiling a lot and laughing now, and seemed particularly entranced by the recent discovery of her right foot.

They decided, in spite of the food processor fiasco, to try giving her her first solid food since she would be four months old in just a couple of days. They pulled out her as-yet unused high chair and set it up in the breakfast nook. Once she was belted in, she sat up fine. As the book suggested, they tried first with some organic rice cereal mixed with breast milk, and she seemed to think that was OK, but she really loved the mashed bananas, which she rubbed all over her entire head.

"How soon before we can give her that five-bomb tofu from the Thai place?" Will asked with a happy smile.

"Give it a few days," Lizzy beamed back. "Let's see what happens when _I_ eat it, first."

* * *

On Monday, Lizzy's and Emma's day went much like the previous Friday: they went out in the morning, and Elena took Emma in the afternoon while Lizzy slept for a couple of hours and then, joy of joys, actually read a novel for the first time in God knows how long. It felt so luxurious. Also, Jane's guest pass for the yoga class arrived in the mail that day. Lizzy checked her exercise clothes and found that nothing fit her, so she ran down to a shop a few blocks away and bought a top and some yoga pants, as well as a yoga mat.

The next morning, Lizzy, with Emma strapped on her chest and the diaper bag in the stroller as usual, found herself outside a storefront a few blocks from the apartment. It had a tasteful lavender sign with an abstract drawing of clouds, maybe, that somehow managed also to look like a pregnant woman. It said "Goddess Maternity: Clothing, Toys and Classes for Healthy, Happy Moms and Babies."

She signed in at the front desk. The smiling woman there pointed her down a darkened aquarium-lined hallway where the classrooms were. Tinkly New Age music played quietly on the speaker system and the hallway smelled faintly like patchouli.

When Lizzy turned the corner at the end of the corridor, she found herself standing in front of a massive stroller corral. It was like a luxury baby buggy showroom: BOBs and Bugaboos and Orbits and Stokkes and some other custom and European models she'd only ever heard about before, none under $1500. Yikes. Of course, _she_ should talk, since there was a $3000 Ellipse languishing under dust and cobwebs in Emma's closet. She parked her $10 umbrella stroller right there along with the best of them, leaving her coat and diaper bag in it. She heard the buzz of conversation further down the hall, but headed for the door marked "Haven of Peace" instead, as instructed.

Apparently she was a few minutes late for class, which was not surprising since just when she'd been about to leave home she'd had to change her clothes after Emma had thrown up all over her first outfit, the nice one she'd bought the day before. Now she was wearing a pre-pregnancy top and bottom that no longer contained either her top or bottom.

When she opened the frosted glass door and walked in, she saw that all the other moms and babies had already staked out places on the floor and were lying on their mats with their babies, stretching out and chattering happily. The teacher had just come to the front of the room and asked everyone to quiet down.

All heads swiveled at the sound of the door slamming shut behind Lizzy, and 20 pairs of plucked, already sky-high eyebrows turned her way. They couldn't go any higher because of the Botox, probably. A little belatedly she noticed the little sign that said "please close the door gently."

"Sorry," said Lizzy, slinking over to the one remaining place on the floor that might conceivably be big enough for another yoga mat. She'd never done yoga before, with or without a baby, but she'd heard good things about it and was looking forward to seeing what it was all about.

When she and Emma had finally settled down, she got a chance to take her first long look at the others in the room. All the moms and babies were wearing matching yoga ensembles, evidently from some designer she'd never heard of before. And over in the corner was, ta da, Caroline Bingley, or whatever her name was now. Oh, God. And Louisa Hurst. Well, maybe there was some hope after all. Lizzy smiled weakly in their direction. Louisa smiled back, and she could see Caroline muttering to herself.

"Let's get started, shall we?" asked the instructor brightly, sitting cross-legged with a big teddy bear on her lap.

They started with some relaxation and stretching. Lizzy's fingertips stopped about three feet away from her toes, and she didn't find the instructor's soothing words very convincing. "You are all perfect just the way you are. Relax and feel your center connect with the earth." She continued on in that vein throughout the next 50 minutes.

Lizzy did her best to follow along. Holding Emma, she lunged and posed and tried to balance. Emma screamed as Lizzy tried to move her in concert with the teddy bear, but the other babies seemed to like the movements. And in spite of the instructor's words about everyone's perfection, she had an awful lot of corrections for Lizzy and Emma. Needless to say, Lizzy did not find any of this very relaxing, and Emma quite evidently wasn't enjoying it, either.

Just as the session finally, finally ended, Emma gave a terrible grunt, her face red and contorted, and had a giant blowout that squirted poop out the leg of her romper, and all over the yoga mat. Everybody heard it—it was impossible to miss since they were all lying there quietly listening to the tinkly music. Perhaps this explained why Emma had been yelling so much during the class. Was it the rice cereal?

"Right!" said Lizzy. She rolled Emma up in the yoga mat, her head sticking out one end in a baby burrito. Lizzy picked up the Baby Bjorn and diaper bag, shoved on her shoes, and shot out the door before anyone else could even sit up.

Fortunately the restroom had a very big and very ritzy diaper-changing station, including wipes and everything, and space for the stroller, which she'd picked up on her way out of the classroom. As Lizzy was trying to get Emma's romper off without getting poop all over absolutely everything, Louisa and Caroline came into the room. Louisa was holding her toddler's hand, but Caroline's son was nowhere in sight.

"Lizzy! How nice to see you. It's been a long time. Since Jane's first baby shower, maybe?" chirped Caroline brightly, clearly enjoying Lizzy's suffering. At the shower, Caroline had tried to steal the spotlight by showing off the three-carat diamond engagement ring she'd recently received from her beau. Lizzy remembered that he had looked sort of like Harry Hamlin, but she forgot his name. She thought it was Dudley Snootypants or something like that. Maybe _Doctor _Dudley Snootypants. Oh no, wait; he was a hedge fund manager, that was it.

"Great to see you, too. That sounds about right," answered Lizzy. "Hi, Louisa."

Louisa smiled and said, "Hi, Lizzy. Can I give you a hand with something?" She got her son to sit on the comfy armchair next to the changing station and then from her pocket pulled out a plastic bag that she held open for the dirty romper and cloth diaper to go in. At the appropriate moments she handed Lizzy a clean diaper, a clean romper, and wipe after wipe after wipe.

"Sorry I can't help, but I just got a manicure," said Caroline, flapping her hands around in the air.

"Oh, I understand," Lizzy nodded. "Thanks, Louisa. I'm surprised to see you here. Aren't you and Gil still out in Westchester?"

"No, we moved back to the city last year. It was too boring in the suburbs. We're on the Upper West Side now. West 84th."

"Cool. We should get together sometime."

"Yeah. Probably not at another yoga class, though. I only came because Caroline had a free guest pass. It's not really my thing, even though Junior here seems to like it."

Lizzy laughed. "That's funny. Jane gave me a pass, too."

Caroline jumped in. "Lizzy, you really should join us at the juice bar next door. A whole group of us go out together after these lessons."

"Oh, I really couldn't. I don't want to intrude." Lizzy thought it sounded like a really, really bad idea.

Louisa gave her a sardonic look. "No, really, you should come. I think you'd have a good time."

Lizzy shrugged her assent. Why not? She didn't have plans for the rest of the morning, after all.

She tossed the yoga mat into the trash as they left the restroom. So much for yoga.

The women from the class had commandeered an entire corner of the juice bar, shoving several tables together so that all of them could squeeze in. They squeezed in even more tightly to make room for Lizzy. She sat between Louisa and a woman who she thought looked familiar. Maybe she'd met her at one of Will's business things? Caroline sat on Louisa's other side.

The waitress, who looked like an aerobics instructor, came and took their orders. Except for Lizzy and Louisa, who actually ordered juice, the other women all ordered zero-calorie flavored water. Lizzy wasn't sure why they bothered coming to a juice bar in the first place.

Lizzy looked around. "Where are all the other babies?" she asked. Emma, snug in the carrier on her chest, and Louisa's son Jason, ensconced in a throne-like high chair, were the only babies at the table.

"Oh, they went home with the nannies after class," Louisa said. What? Lizzy guessed they must all have made the handoff while she and Emma had been in the restroom. Where had the nannies been hiding during the class? Was there a nanny corral around the corner from the stroller corral? Maybe that was the source of the voices she'd heard farther down the hall.

Caroline introduced Lizzy to the other women. "Angela Weatherby...Jennifer Castle-Frink...Missy St. Cloud..." She continued around the table. When she got to the last woman, she said, "And Piper Swales. Girls, Lizzy Darcy."

Oh, crap. It was Chip Swales' wife. He was the guy who'd been an associate and then a partner at her old firm, DeWitt. He also knew Will from the club. He was the one who had been such a bad sport on the squash court that none of the other men wanted to play against him.

"Bennet. It's still Bennet," Lizzy said. "Hi, Piper. It's great to see you again," she lied. Piper murmured her concurrence and smiled, but nothing higher than the tip of her perfect Diana Ross nose moved. It was hard to tell if that was because the smile was insincere or because of the Botox.

"How old is your baby?" Caroline leaned around to ask.

"She's just four months."

"Oh, really? I thought she was younger than that," Caroline said dismissively.

Oh, great. Here it came. "Why is that?" Lizzy inquired, wondering why she bothered.

"You know, her neck tone."

Lizzy found this perplexing, because Emma's neck tone was just fine. She was holding her head up and doing baby pushups during tummy time.

"What _about _her neck tone?" she asked, annoyed.

Caroline laughed. "No need to get huffy. Her head is just a little wobbly, that's all." She confided to the table at large, "My little Jaden was holding his head up at only two months. He has a neck like an ox."

"Right, and he's reading _The New York Times_ now, too, at 12 months," interjected Louisa.

"Oh, stop it, Louisa." Caroline swatted at her.

Lizzy decided to change the subject. "So your son is a year old, Caroline?" Caroline nodded. "You look great."

"Thank you," Caroline preened. "It's all the Pilates."

Piper chimed in, "Oh, yes, the Pilates. Pilates is what does it."

"And the mommy tuck you had right after your scheduled C-section," Louisa added.(1)

"What's a mommy tuck?" Lizzy asked her, even though she knew she really shouldn't.

"It's a tummy tuck that they do right there on the operating table while they've already got you opened up like a watermelon. Your belly is tight as a drum the next day."

Caroline snapped, "Quit exaggerating, Lou! You know that's not true. You have to wait at least six weeks. But the results are great, Lizzy." She sat up straight and smoothed her tight spandex top even tighter over her flat belly. "See?"

Louisa smirked. "And you should see how high her belly button is now, too! Do you know how they do the mommy tuck? They cut the skin like a C-section, and they suck out all the excess fat with liposuction, and then they pull the belly skin waaaaay down tight and cut a new hole for a belly button—"

"Louisa!" Hissed Caroline. Even Lizzy thought Louisa had probably gone too far this time. Her stomach lurched a little at the whole belly button thing.

One of the other women hurriedly changed the subject and they all started talking about a new spa that some of them had recently visited. Then they moved on to hair stylists and colorists, the newest mani-pedi techniques, waxing, just how long was long enough in the tanning bed every week, and where you could get the best bikinis for your upcoming tropical vacation.

Lizzy turned to Louisa and laughingly muttered, "Wait, why are we here, again?"

"You want to go? It's cold, but we could take the kids to the park for a little while," Louisa offered.

"Yeah, Emma's getting restless."

"As opposed to you," smiled Louisa.

Lizzy laughed, slapping her $10 bill on the table, and the two of them said their goodbyes, threw on their coats, and headed out into the chilly air with the kids and strollers. Lizzy buttoned her coat around Emma in the baby carrier to keep her warm.

As they walked along toward the park, Lizzy asked, "So, Louisa, I want to know, what draws you in, makes you hang out with Caroline, when you two clearly have some issues?"

"The usual. Sisterly affection. Familial obligation. The strange allure of the absurd and repulsive. It's complicated." She smirked and hoisted Jason onto her hip.

"Yeah, it usually is with sisters." And I should know, Lizzy thought.

"Oh, and also, I'm writing a novel," added Louisa nonchalantly.

"What?! I thought you wrote children's books."

"I do. But now I'm also writing a _roman à clef_ about pampered Upper East Side women and their obsessions and perversions."

Lizzy guffawed. "Oh, my God. So you were doing field research."

"Guilty as charged," agreed Louisa with a sly grin.

"Is this why you moved back from Westchester, too?" Lizzy kicked a bit of gravel farther down the sidewalk.

"Well, that, and I was going out of my freaking mind out there in the 'burbs. And, Gil started drinking again because he was bored, too. I quit when I got pregnant with Jason, and we figured he'd dry out better and faster here where there was more support."

"Really?" Lizzy found this surprising, considering that there was a bar about every ten feet in Manhattan. On the other hand, there was an AA meeting about every ten feet, too, so maybe it cut both ways. "So, what's he doing to keep busy, then?"

"Oh, sorry. I thought you knew. He's a poet. He's writing full time, spends a lot of time at writing workshops and readings and poetry slams, that kind of thing. He's pretty good."

Lizzy couldn't have been more surprised. Gil Hurst, a poet? Of course the few times she'd met him, he'd been drunk and hardly said more than three words at a time, those words usually being "Red or white?"

"Wow. That's cool. And what about you? You sound busy."

"Yeah, I am. Usually I hang out with Jason in the morning, and then we have a babysitter in the afternoon, and that's when I work on my book. Well, either on my novel, or else a couple of other kids' projects I have going on. Storybooks with illustrations. Watercolors, mostly."

"Sounds great."

"Yeah. It's really good. I'm happier than I've ever been, I think. What about you? I'm surprised to see you out and about on a weekday."

Lizzy explained about her situation, concluding, "So, here I am."

Louisa shot her a knowing glance. "Trying to figure it all out, huh?"

Lizzy said, "Yeah, I guess. Wandering vaguely."

"Well, 'not all who wander are lost,' or whatever the saying is."

"We'll see. It's a big change, but I think it'll be good, too. I feel like I was missing a lot of important stuff before, you know, things you can never get back."

By this time they had reached the park, and Louisa put Jason down so he could go play on the toddler slide.

"Well, if you want, you could come over to our place one morning. On Thursdays we usually get together for a playdate with a couple of my girlfriends and their kids. And when I say 'playdate,' I mean a playdate for the moms. The kids are too little to actually play with each other. Mostly they just pound on stuff with toy hammers and that kind of thing."

"Yeah, OK. That sounds like fun." Clearly Caroline's yoga class at Goddess Maternity was not Lizzy's thing, but it seemed worthwhile to check out what Louisa and her friends were up to. There was a whole new world to be explored.

That night, Lizzy and Will enjoyed a little chocolate decadence cake to celebrate Emma's four-month birthday. This one was definitely not vegan, fat-free, or gluten-free, and it was much more delicious. They let the four candles burn longer than they would have otherwise, because Emma was mesmerized, watching the flames dance and shimmer.

Lizzy told Will about the yoga class and Louisa's running commentary at the juice bar, and he laughed so hard that he had to get up to get a tissue to wipe his streaming eyes.

"Oh my God," he said, gasping. "I know Missy St. Cloud from the sailing club when I was a teenager. Believe it or not, she used to look like an actual human being."

"Well, thanks to her plastic surgeon, now she looks like 'The Scream,'" said Lizzy, lifting her eyebrows up as far as they could go and opening her mouth up in a big "O."

After they'd eaten the cake, Will took Emma into the living room to play on the baby gym while Lizzy cleaned up. After she'd finished, she walked into the room just as Emma, lying on her back on the mat, started crying and made her pooping face.

Lizzy said, "Sheesh, another poo diaper? I swear, this must be number six today."

Will, sitting on the floor next to Emma said, "It's OK, I'll get this one." He leaned over and scooped her up with one hand under her neck and the other under her bum. As he headed, cooing to Emma, over to the changing table in its place of honor in the corner of the living room, Lizzy saw his expression change from delight to disgust.

"Blowout?" Lizzy asked from the sofa.

"Yup. Bad one, straight up her back. Two-person job." Lizzy jumped up to help.

They worked together in a routine they'd developed to keep Emma calm: Will sang the "The Ants Go Marching" as he held Emma's ankles up in the air with one hand and wiped with the other, while Lizzy handed him wipes, removed and replaced Emma's clothes and diaper and walked into the bathroom to drop the diaper in the diaper pail and the clothes in the sink to be rinsed.

"Wow, a record—this one took ten wipes. She's got a bad rash, too," commented Will as he patted Emma's finally clothed body. Then he looked at his left hand. "Shit."

"What's the matter, sweetheart?" she called from the bathroom, swishing the clothes in the sink.

"Poo all over." He came in, Emma tucked under his right arm, to show her the mess on his wedding ring, wristwatch, and shirtsleeve.

"Did you get any on your pants?"

"No, I don't think so. Just the shirt. Take her?" he grumbled as he tried and failed to unlatch his watchband while still holding Emma.

Lizzy hung up Emma's clothes on the shower curtain bar, washed her dried-out, cracked hands for the millionth time that day, and took Emma from him as he surveyed the damage.

Suddenly she couldn't take it anymore. "I've really had it with these damn cloth diapers!" she cried. "I don't care what Jane says. Screw the landfill. To hell with dioxins—she has diaper rash anyway. I'm going to get some disposables. Right now. Want anything else from the drugstore?"

He barely had time to shake his head no before she shot out the door and into the elevator, Emma on her hip. This was one of the many advantages of living in the city—there was a drugstore just around the corner.

When she came back into the apartment, she threw a big bag of disposable diapers on the floor next to the changing table and went to find Will, who was still in the bathroom.

"What's going on?" she asked when she saw him holding up and staring, bemused, at a drinking glass that appeared to have his ring, his Rolex and a lot of bubbles in it. "Whaddaya have there?"

"Well, I thought I'd clean off my watch by throwing it in some soapy water." He pulled the offending item out and showed it to her. She could see that, behind the crystal, the watch face was up to the middle of the dial with water. She half expected to see fish swimming around in there, and maybe a tiny mermaid or two.

"Oh. Oops." She shifted Emma to the other side to get a better look.

"I guess it's the _other _Rolex that's water resistant. Ah, well," he grimaced and shrugged in resignation.

Only he could be so blasé about destroying a $30,000 watch, she thought.

"You know, according to the package, these new diapers apparently have something in them called MegAbsorbum that magically makes liquid disappear forever, like it's been sucked into a black hole." she said, nodding her head sagely. "Do you want to wrap the watch up in the diaper and see what happens?"

He got a good chuckle out of that, but said he'd ask Ahmed to take the watch to the jeweler to see if there was anything they could do to resuscitate it. Save the Rolexes! thought Lizzy.

* * *

On Thursday, Lizzy did go to the playdate at Louisa's, and it _was _pretty fun. Louisa and Gil had a brownstone that they had gutted and done really interesting things to, ripping out walls to make an open floor plan on the first floor. Some highlights were a mantlepiece made out of a mosaic of broken pottery and glass tiles, and Louisa's giant mural of abstract flowers on the dining room wall. She had also painted a castle and a dragon and knights and ladies on all four walls of Jason's bedroom on the second floor. It was a Bohemian dream. A Bohemian with lots and lots of money, anyway.

The two other women were educated, artistic, and interested in the world. One of them wrote a blog about parenting. She said she mostly worked on it while her kids were napping, and a couple of afternoons a week when she had a babysitter. The other woman designed, made, and sold natural cotton children's clothing from her apartment, also while her kids napped. Lizzy thought it must be nice to have kids who napped. The two women were reading a novel together with Louisa, and they talked about that a little, although not long enough to make Lizzy feel left out. They all wiped each other's kids' noses, and picked each other's kids up when they fell down, and stopped each other's kids from pulling heavy objects off the bookcase and onto their heads, and soothed each other's kids when they cried.

For three hours, the women talked, and the kids played, and napped—except for Emma—and ate. Then they all went home after lunch, the kids bound for their afternoon naps and the moms for their respective creative activities. It was fun, and they invited her back for the next week. She thought she would probably go.

As Lizzy and Emma headed home in a cab, Lizzy reflected on the morning. Louisa and her friends were relaxed, and happy, too. You could see it in their eyes. She wondered if she could be happy with that kind of life, too. She was pretty sure that Will wouldn't like it if she painted the dining room wall with giant flowers, and not only because if she tried to paint a flower it would probably come out looking like snails or a fungus under a microscope. She also had no talent for designing things, or telling funny stories on a blog. Or for home decorating more generally, or for cooking. And also she didn't enjoy doing those things. Basically she was a failure as a woman, when you added it all up like that.

On the other hand, in spite of Lizzy's inability to do things beautifully, Emma seemed to be thriving. They were doing really well together, finding their rhythm. Things were going to get easier as Emma grew and, hopefully, started sleeping more. She was glad, really glad, that they were sharing this adventure together.

Lizzy held Emma's little hand and watched her curious eyes take everything in through the back window of the taxi as they made their way across town.

* * *

_Footnotes:_

(1) About one in three births in the U.S. are by Caesarean section in 2013, and many of them are elective. Rumor has it that quite a few celebrities schedule them ahead of time for their own convenience and that of their doctors. A "mommy tuck" is a real (celebrity) thing, too, and it works just as described in this story.

* * *

_Please let me know what __your __curious eyes noticed, just below._


	10. Chapter 10

_A/N: Thanks as always to my betas, Jan, Barbara, and Alison._

* * *

**Chapter 10**

**February 2013**

The day after Lizzy's first playdate with Louisa, New York came to a total standstill for the second time in four months. On Friday, February 8, winter storm Nemo dumped huge amounts of snow across New England and down into New York and Connecticut, paralyzing many of the major cities in the Northeast. At first Lizzy scoffed at the idea that it was going to be very bad—the meteorologists were always going overboard with this whole "superstorm" thing. In the end, though, she decided to get prepared, just in case. New York City ended up with only 12 inches of snow, which wasn't very serious. But a lot of people on Long Island and in Connecticut who were still recovering from Sandy got hit really hard, again. Some of them still didn't have power from the hurricane in October. This was the last thing they needed on top of all that. Lizzy sent off another boatload of money to the Red Cross for disaster relief. They were going to need it.

During the worst of the storm, Lizzy and Will and most other people stayed indoors, as the mayor had asked. Will didn't go to work on Friday, and Elena stayed home, too, even though the storm wasn't due until the afternoon. Will and Lizzy lolled around most of the day on the living room floor with Emma. She was really holding her head up well now, and they watched together as she expertly kicked her leg over and rolled from her back onto her tummy. Now the big challenge was whether she could roll onto her stomach from her back. It was so exciting! They tried out a few new foods on her, puréed prunes and puréed peaches, puréed carrots and peas. She spit each one out, still seeming to prefer breast milk. They talked to her and listened carefully to what she said back. It seemed that she was trying to mimic their words. They put her in a sitting position and caught her when she fell over in slow motion. All in all, they agreed they had never seen such an adorable, wonderful, brilliant, beautiful child, and that they were the luckiest parents in the whole world.

Like most New Yorkers, Lizzy had stocked up on groceries in anticipation of the storm. She'd had a big order delivered from one of the organic markets in the neighborhood on Thursday. She knew that they might actually have to cook if the storm was bad enough, so she bought things she hadn't had in the house for years: a little fresh meat, veggies to roast, garlic and onions, salad greens.

Someone—someone who didn't know them very well, obviously—had given them a cookbook as a wedding present years ago, and they'd never opened it up before. But now, on Friday afternoon, Lizzy searched the bookshelves in one of the guest rooms for it and took it out into the living room, blowing a little dust off the cover as she walked. She set it down on the floor, and she and Will looked at it curiously for a moment.

Lizzy reached out and poked it with her finger, pulling back quickly as if it had burned her. "What does it do?" she joked.

"I don't know. I've never seen anything like it before," said Will, the corner of his mouth quirking up a little.

Lizzy cracked open the book and thumbed through it. It was some kind of French-inspired American cookbook, but it looked simple enough. Beef stew would be a really yummy thing to eat on a cold, snowy day like today, she thought, so she looked for that. She found something that they had most of the ingredients for, and decided to make it, along with some crusty bread that had been in the grocery order. It turned out so well, even without potatoes, celery or a bay leaf, that Lizzy thought she might try cooking again some day, provided she could figure out how to get Emma to agree to sit down in a chair or something. She didn't think that Emma, who now faced forward in the baby carrier, and very sharp knives would mix very well. Cooking really wasn't so bad, she thought, when she had all the time in the world to do it and when there was nowhere else she had to be.

While Lizzy chopped and sautéed, Will played with Emma in the living room. For a while, the two of them looked out the window, watching the wind whipping trees and debris around. After that, Will got out his family photo albums and showed Emma pictures. From the kitchen, she could hear his narration.

"That's me, when I was a little baby. Can you believe that Daddy was a baby once? It's true. I used to be as small as you. That's your Grandma Anne and Grandpa Bill. You've never met them because they died a long, long time ago. Look at that beautiful dress she's wearing! Wow. They were dressed up to go somewhere really fancy. See this cute little girl? That's your Aunt Georgie. You've never met her, either, but maybe you will one day. She's my little sister. You can see, she's a lot younger than me. That's us together, when I was in high school. These are my aunts and uncles, your great-aunts and uncles, that means Grandma's brothers and sisters. But you've never met them, either. This one is my cousin Richard and me when we were little. He's your...well, let's call him Uncle Richard. You saw him and his wife Eleanor last month."

Hearing this made Lizzy happy, but very sad at the same time. She was happy because Will was sharing his past and introducing Emma to the family, but sad because it brought home to her once again how estranged, how cut off from everyone who should have loved and supported him, he was. Was it time to make more of an effort to reach out to Will's family? He was so alone in the world, in many ways, and she wasn't sure that she and Emma were enough. Her family, lunatics that they were, was sure no substitute.

That evening after she nursed Emma to sleep, she made her way sleepily back out to the entertainment room where Will was watching a movie on TV. He was slumped down low with his feet up on the coffee table.

"What are you watching?" she asked, curling up against him and pulling his arm around her.

"'The Royal Tenenbaums,'" he said a little ruefully.

"Oh, dear, dysfunctional families on your mind?"

"Yeah, a little." He squeezed her tighter for a moment.

"Well, at least it's not 'A Long Hot Summer,' or something like that. Or 'I, Claudius,' with everyone killing each other."

He smiled a little and shook his head. "No, we're not that bad."

"Is it the pictures that got you thinking, or something else?"

"I guess looking at the album just made me think of Georgie. She hasn't been back in touch with Richard since the end of December."

"Do you want to try to reach out to her? Or to try to patch things up with your aunts and uncles and cousins?"

"I don't think it would be a good idea, with Georgie. Not really sure about the rest."

"Well, let me know. I'll do whatever you need me to do."

He turned and looked into her eyes for a moment before leaning over and kissing her tenderly, his hand on the back of her head. "Thanks. I don't know. Maybe you and Emma are all the family I need."

She tilted her head to look back at him, and then rested her head on his shoulder. "All right, but it's OK if you need more than just us. There are lots of kinds of familial love, and you're entitled to them all, if you want them."

He put his free arm around her, too, and ran his hand down her side, where it came to rest on her hip. "All right. Are you in the mood for some conjugal love? Or are you too tired?"

"No, not too tired. I've been feeling a little better every day this week, now that I can nap when I need to." She gazed at his beautiful face, still sad around the eyes, a little scruffy since he hadn't shaved for work. "Poor sweetheart."

"What? I'm OK."

"No, I think you need some serious cheering up. Come lie down on my couch and tell Dr. Lizzy all about it." She waggled her eyebrows at him and leaned over to give him a big, inviting kiss. Then she stood up and pulled him into the guest room.

Lizzy kicked off the session by asking some probing questions about his wishes and desires. She wasn't entirely satisfied by his responses—he seemed to be holding something back. She decided that the appropriate treatment at this time was some ego-stroking, so she stroked his ego gently at first, but with increasing firmness and speed until she finally got the result she was looking for. At last, his super-ego relaxed its customary death grip on his id, which finally and completely took over. Ah, the raging sea, the unpredictable undertow of the id unleashed, she thought, as she took a deep breath and dove right in. My, the water was fine.

Admittedly, it was a little rushed because, after all, they only had time for a 50-minute session before Emma woke up and lit up the baby monitor with her cries. As they lay wrapped in each others' arms on the bed in the guest room, Lizzy said, "See, that wasn't so bad, was it? A little therapy can do wonders for a person."

"Yeah," Will said, still panting a little bit, "I think I might have to switch therapists for good. Dr. Andrews never did _that _for me." Dr. Andrews was the therapist Will had seen a few years before, when things had been really bad with Georgie. He was a skinny little guy in his sixties who looked like a flea wearing black horn-rimmed glasses.

"Well, I should hope not. That move is going in the permanent repertoire, I think."

Will laughed. "Yes, please. How did you even think of that?"

Lizzy shrugged. "You know, I read an article about it in a professional journal. We therapist types have to be creative when our first approach hits a roadblock."

Will let out a big gusty sigh as he relaxed completely.

Lizzy propped herself up on one elbow and looked at him. "Tell me about your childhood," she said, doing her best Sigmund Freud imitation.

He chuckled. "What do you want to know?"

"You tell me. It seems to be on your mind lately, but you hardly ever talk about it. Were you happy?"

"Well...you know, my parents weren't particularly happy together, and that tends to, sort of, poison the whole family in a way, right?

"Yes, in my experience." Lizzy looked up at the ceiling, avoiding his gaze. She could have said a lot more on that subject, but it was his turn to talk.

"Yeah, so like I've said, my dad wasn't around very much, between the work and, I guess, all the women. I don't really know how or why, but I think they tried to patch things up around the time Georgie was born. That wasn't successful, obviously."

"And your mom?"

"She was very busy, too, planning events and doing stuff with the Trust. I don't really know what she did all day. She didn't talk to me about it."

"So who did you spend time with?"

"Adults, you mean? My nanny, Mrs. Llewellyn, of course, when I was little. I think I told you, she retired and went back to the U.K. right around the time Georgie was born. I think she was in her sixties. Thinking about it now, seeing how demanding Emma is, I think maybe she wasn't up to taking care of another little baby. After that we had Mrs. Martinez, but I wasn't that close to her. She mostly looked after Georgie."

"Did she pick you up after school and that kind of thing?"

"No, I was in middle school by that time. I had tutors and classes and clubs and all that after school. Our driver picked me up and took me where I needed to go."

"Didn't you ever just hang around and, I don't know, play with your friends?"

Will shrugged. "Like with neighbors or something? No, there weren't any kids in our building. But of course I did spend time with the other kids from Renwick in the clubs and things I mentioned before." Renwick was the Renwick Preparatory Academy for Boys and Girls, where all the Darcys had always gone and always would go.

"Like what? Karate or chess or something?"

"Don't laugh—in seventh grade I was president of the investment club."

Lizzy couldn't help it. Lying on her back, she laughed so hard that tears ran down into her ears. "No freaking way!" she gasped when she finally caught her breath. "You were twelve years old and you had an investment club?"

The corner of Will's mouth quirked up. "You bet. Our parents wanted us all to learn how to manage our money ourselves. We all had substantial portfolios in real life, and we ran simulations of different investment strategies in the stock and bond markets. Every quarter, our parents gave us a penny on the dollar for our profits, and we had to pay them a penny on the dollar for our losses. It was very educational."

"Wow. I'll say. Meanwhile, after school I was vacuuming or playing with worms in the backyard with my sisters, or watching cartoons while eating tubs of Cool Whip. Didn't you want to do that kind of thing, too? Have some fun?"

"Frankly, it wasn't that fun or interesting at home. I could read or watch TV or do homework. Talk to the staff. Anyway, I made a bargain with my dad. I agreed to do investment club and some other stuff he wanted me to do a couple of days a week, and he let me do squash club and some other stuff I wanted to do a couple of days a week."

"What was the other stuff he wanted you to do? I mean, it's great that he took an interest, right?"

"Yeah, every year he handed me a list of stuff that he wanted me to do. It was a big deal the first time I came back at him with a counter-proposal."

"So, what was on his list?"

"You know, stuff I didn't want to do." Will looked down and watched his finger tracing a circle on the bedspread.

Lizzy noticed he was studiously avoiding answering the question. "And what was that? Polo lessons? Bridge club? How to hold a martini glass?"

Will sighed. "Etiquette and ballroom dancing, among other things, if you must know."

"Get out! Really? You're serious? That sounds like what your mom would want, not your dad, anyway."

"Sadly, I am very serious. How else do you learn how to be a proper escort at the débutante ball, or which fork to use at the formal dinner at that débutante ball?"

"Well...I never really thought about it. I assumed it was in the water or something."

"Nope. It's every pre-teen boy's dream, as you might imagine," he said wryly.

"So you bargained your way out of it?"

"No, of course not. But I got less of it, and I got some other things I wanted. And probably you're right that my dad might have let me get out of it because actually those were things my mom wanted me to do, not him."

"Huh. So I guess that your dad had some pretty firm ideas about how you should live your life," she said, thinking about what he'd told her years ago about his struggles with his dad over his major in college.

"He had pretty firm ideas about _everything_. You can see it in how he ran the company, too. He micromanaged everything there, too. A little dictatorship."

Lizzy reflected for a few beats about what he'd said. "It also sounds like maybe you were kind of lonely. Is that right?"

"Uh...I'm not sure I'd put it that way, exactly, but I guess it sort of captures it, yes."

Lizzy lay back down and snaked her arms around him. She wondered if he had any idea of all the things he had missed, when in other ways he had had everything.

"Didn't you have _any _other kids around to play with?"

"My cousins, sometimes, yeah. They lived in the city for part of the year."

"Huh." She thought some more. "Well, is all of this how you envision Emma growing up? Is this what you want for Emma, too?"

He shook his head. "No, definitely not. You and I, we're already so different from that, together. Or, like today, the kind of day we had today, just sitting around and enjoying each other's company, that's not something we ever did."

"Did you like it?"

"Yeah! It was a great day. A really great day."

"There's something to be said for just being together, right?"

"Hmmm."

"Yeah. I think so, too. Well, what about the etiquette classes and ballroom dancing lessons? Do you want to make Emma do that stuff, too?"

"God, I don't know. I think I have a better idea of what I don't want than what I do want."

"Well, let's talk about it, and see if we can figure out what we both want for her and for us." They both rolled onto their sides to face each other.

"OK, what do you want for Emma?"

"I get to go first, eh?" she laughed. "All right. Jane said something to me once that really stuck with me. I know, she says a lot of stuff, and I...I'm starting to think that a lot of it is, uh, well, for lack of a better word, a load of crap. But anyway, one time she told me that the important thing is to raise a well-adjusted, happy adult, not a perfect child. That seems really right to me. So, the first thing I want is for Emma to know she is loved, I want her to feel secure, and to know that we are there for her. Really there, present in her life."

"How do we do that without smothering her?"

"Oh, wow. They're not the same thing at all, I think. One is helping her achieve her own goals, and the other is telling her what to do all the time, telling her what her goals have to be."

"All right, I can see that. But I can also see that there are dangers in loving too much, you know, coddling. It's important to me that she have some real, substantial goals in her life, and some things she really cares about." Lizzy knew he was thinking of Georgie when he said that. "And also, she needs to know that along with all the advantages and resources she has, come certain responsibilities and obligations to others, to the family and also to people who don't have all that she has."

"I completely agree about the last part, and I think we need to show her that every day. Let's talk about this coddling thing, though. Are you saying you think parental love should be conditional? Like she has to earn it or something?"

"No, what I mean is, we can't allow our love for her to mean we give her a free pass, no matter what she does."

She decided that, since they were talking about Georgie, they might as well actually talk about Georgie. "So, am I correct in thinking here that you're talking about Georgie not facing any consequences for her behavior?"

"Yeah. And my cousins. Richard's younger brother...let's just say that his parents' love for him has gotten him out of some, uh, legal situations that ordinary people wouldn't have walked away from. There are other examples."

"I see. That's not really what I meant by unconditional love. You can love your kids and still say no sometimes. In fact, you _have _to say no sometimes, give them some rules and boundaries. They need that. They also need to face the consequences of their actions. That doesn't mean you don't love them, no matter what. It means you're teaching them to be responsible adults one day."

"And if they disappoint you, or don't do what you expect?"

"Oh, man. Is that what was going on with your dad? He said you disappointed him?"

"No, it was more that he would be disappointed in me if I didn't become the person he wanted, or if I didn't do certain things."

"Like majoring in economics, right? OK, that's something I am going to insist on. We are never, ever going to say that to Emma. Never. We'll try to help her make good choices, but our love for her is never conditional."

"Hmm, sounds like you have some strong feelings on this subject."

Lizzy nodded. "Sure. My dad has made it abundantly clear that he doesn't approve of the choices I've made in life lately. Who needs that?"

"Since you married me, you mean," he said grimly.

Lizzy reached out and stroked his cheek. "I have no regrets. You've given me more love and...understanding, true understanding, and compassion in six years than they did in thirty years."

He closed his eyes and leaned forward to rest his forehead on hers. "I don't know. I'm beginning to think I've been letting you down since Emma was born, without even realizing it. Maybe in other ways I don't realize, either."

Her voice fierce, she said, "Never. You could never let me down. We might have some things to work through, but we'll figure it out. I love _you _no matter what, too. OK? That's what unconditional love means. I'm giving mine to Emma now, but I already gave it to you a long time ago. Do you really understand that? Can't you feel it?"

"I'm sure there are some things I could do to make you change your mind about me."

"Like what?"

"I don't know, if I killed someone, or if I started running around with other women."

"I really don't see you doing either of those things. I don't think you have it in you. You're too decent, fundamentally."

"But what if I changed? What if I...I don't know, sold WPD or something."

"That wouldn't change who you are in essentials. I quit my job. Do you love me any less?"

"Of course not. Your job is not why I love you."

"Same for me."

They both paused to mull this over. He raised his eyebrows and gave her a significant look.

Lizzy poked Will's arm. "I see what you did there. You got me to say I have to accept that all these changes in my life won't change the fact that you love me. All right, I'll accept that. But I want you to realize the same thing about yourself. You don't have to please your father anymore by killing yourself over that company. If you gave up the kingdom I wouldn't love you any less, OK?"

"I didn't mean it literally. I'm not going to sell WPD."

"Well, why not?"

"What if Emma wants it when she grows up? It's our legacy. My dad used most of his inheritance to start it."

"What if she doesn't want it? What if she wants to do something else with her life? She might want to be a scientist, or a teacher, or a skydiver or...God forbid, a lawyer. It wouldn't be the end of the world, right?"

"No, you're right. I just want her to have something important, something to give her direction and meaning."

"She seems to have a lot of direction already. Mostly toward these." She pointed toward her chest.

He chuckled. They talked and talked until they fell asleep. When Lizzy got up to feed a crying Emma, she didn't even notice that it was 2 o'clock and that Emma hadn't nursed at midnight.

* * *

While they lounged around more on Saturday, went out into the snow on Sunday to play and even found a restaurant that was open for dinner, Lizzy thought a lot about what Will had said about the responsibilities and obligations that came with the kind of wealth they had, the things that Emma needed to know about. She thought she, herself, probably hadn't been holding up her end of things in that regard since they'd been married, because she'd been trying to pretend all along that they really weren't that rich. But of course, they were. She knew some about the Fitzwilliam-Darcy Trust, and the new projects it had been financing for at-risk teens since Lydia's OD. But she'd basically left that to Will, because it was his thing, his family's money. She didn't really understand how it all worked. Should she be doing more? Did she in fact have any responsibilities there, any say in how the money was used? She gave money to lots of causes that she cared about, and she always had. But should she be thinking about these things differently now? Could her, their, donations be made more effectively?

As they were doing a little baby-clothes laundry on Sunday, she asked him about the Trust, and about his, their, charitable giving, and how it all worked. She asked whether she could be more involved.

"Of course. It's your money, too. I didn't know you were interested in all this stuff," he said as he measured the hypoallergenic liquid laundry detergent.

"Well, I guess I didn't have time to think about it very much before. And what you said about Emma needing to understand all this made me realize I didn't, myself."

"Do you want to make an appointment to talk to my financial advisor? She could fill you in on exactly what we've done already, how much we have to give, and the legalities around charitable giving and all that."

"Yeah, OK." She pushed the button to start the washer. "I guess I haven't been very disciplined in how I've been giving. But you have to be more, um, strategic, to make a real difference, right? And think bigger?"

"Yeah, that's right. Do you have something in mind?"

"Hmm, maybe." They walked down the hall back to the living room. Will slung Emma under his arm like a football. Lizzy almost told him not to do it because it wasn't safe, but Emma squealed and smiled happily and laughed, so she didn't. "I was thinking about Bella's Place, the women's shelter. It's been an important part of my life for years. I was thinking maybe I'd start volunteering there again some afternoons. I'll still do that, and of course I'll still sponsor a few families transitioning into permanent housing. But that's all really thinking too small, isn't it?"

"Probably, if you think the work they do is really good. If you want, I can talk you through the process of planning and making a big donation to Bella's Place, or even going bigger than that like we did with the at-risk teen network."

"All right. Let's talk."

* * *

On Monday afternoon, leaving Emma in Elena's care, Lizzy headed uptown to Bella's Place in the SUV, jammed full of baby gear, although it still barely made a dent in all the huge pile of baby stuff sitting in Emma's room. Some of the gear might stay permanently in the shelter. Some of it might go with the women and kids when they left the shelter. Some of it was precious nonsense that they might sell on ebay to someone who cared about having an organic cotton all-natural phthalate-free baby geegaw. It could all help somehow.

Also in the front seat was a big pile of her pre-Emma business suits in their dry-cleaning bags. She knew she'd never fit into them again. She was resigned to the fact that even when she lost her baby weight one day, she still wouldn't ever be the same shape as before. Why have these things hanging around in the closet haunting her? The women at the shelter were always in need of job interview suits, and these might help someone who was her old size. So off they went.

Lizzy parked in a loading zone, hazards flashing, and ran into the rundown old brownstone to ask a couple of volunteers for help bringing the stuff in from the car and into the donation-processing room. She headed toward Donna, the director's, office and said hi to her assistant, Tanya. She couldn't expect just to drop in and do any work, so she'd work out a regular schedule with the volunteer coordinator later. For now she just asked to make an appointment to meet with Donna later in the week, and they settled on a time on Friday afternoon.

It felt good to be back. Really good.

After this exciting trip, though, Lizzy felt very tired, so she went home and took a nap. After she woke up from her nap, she read the _Times _and checked out some legal blogs that she had always enjoyed following. The Supreme Court would be announcing the results of its deliberations on the cases before it this term soon, and the media were full of speculation about what the Court would say and why. That was fun. Then she read a novel for half an hour before it was time to relieve Elena. OK, she was still bone tired, and maybe she wasn't quite ready to jump back into things yet. But she felt for the first time in a long time as though that day might actually come.

That week, she and Emma started to settle into their new routine. Lizzy tried to resist overscheduling, since that seemed to be her default mode. So she decided to build a couple of "surprise me!" free-time blocks into their weekly plan.

Emma seemed to be feeling increasingly secure. She slept for longer stretches at night, closer to three hours at a time most nights. Between that and the naps, Lizzy continued to feel better as the days passed.

Once she caught sight of herself in a toyshop window as she and Emma had stopped to check out a very elaborate marble run. From a certain perspective, she looked like hell. Her hair was a mess, she was wearing a frumpy winter coat, stretched-out mom yoga pants and old sneakers. On the other hand, even she could see that she was more relaxed than she'd been in ages. Better still, she hadn't known it before she looked, but she was smiling broadly at Emma. This was good. Really good.

She and Emma took a lot of field trips during their times together. Sometimes they dropped in to see Will at work. Once they went to the Children's Museum of Manhattan. Emma was a little overstimulated at first by the high level of noise and activity at the museum, but after a while she got used to it and kicked and laughed as she watched the older kids running around and playing. Strapped to Lizzy's chest, Emma finger painted on the mural wall painting with Lizzy's guidance, and also finger painted a picture they could take home. Well, sort of. Actually Lizzy guided her hands and arms to make sure she left a lot of paint on the paper and very little in her mouth. Emma liked the bright colors everywhere and the splashing of the water in the water table. Of course it would all be a lot more fun when she could walk and didn't shove her hand in her mouth all the time. In anticipation of that day, Lizzy bought a family membership.

When Lizzy got home she stuck Emma's finger painting on the refrigerator door with a magnet. It was the first piece of artwork there, and it broke up the monotony of the sleek black and stainless kitchen nicely. Emma and her colorful gear and playthings had already taken over the sterile white blankness of the living room, and were now making inroads on the kitchen. Which room would be next, Lizzy wondered? Would the whole apartment eventually be transformed from a showcase into someplace that looked like people actually lived in it?

That Thursday morning, they had a fun time at Louisa's. Tina, one of the other women, taught Lizzy how to whip up an easy batch of chili and cornbread for lunch, and then they all enjoyed eating it together.

Later in the day, Lizzy did something she had been dreading for a long time: she went to the women lawyers group meeting. The group met the second Thursday of every month, and Lizzy had skipped the one in January because she had been so snowed under with work. At 6 o'clock, she walked into the tapas bar where they always met, Emma strapped to her chest. Vanessa saw her coming, and waved for Lizzy to come sit on the stool next to her at the high table. Audrey, the young, single woman, said hi but kept her distance. Janice and Laura greeted her warmly.

To Lizzy's surprise, Paula came over to meet Emma, and cooed and fussed over her like nobody's business. When Paula finally looked up, she noticed that Lizzy was giving her a funny look.

"What? I like babies as much as the next person," Paula said, a little affronted. "Can I hold her?"

"Sure, of course," Lizzy sputtered, unbuckling the baby carrier and handing Emma over.

Paula turned to Vanessa as she held Emma in her arms. "I have six nieces and nephews. _Six_. I used to take them to the zoo when they were little."

That was unexpected, thought Lizzy. "Well, maybe you heard, but I gave notice at HRI. I'm officially unemployed." She looked right at Paula as she said it, issuing a challenge.

Paula used her free hand to make a zipping motion across her mouth, and then she turned an imaginary key and threw it away. She smiled at Lizzy with her lips completely closed. Lizzy smiled back

Vanessa asked, "How are you doing? I haven't seen you two for ages. Emma's so big!"

"Great. I'm doing great. Feeling a lot better."

* * *

Friday afternoon, Lizzy met with Donna, the director of Bella's Place. Lizzy told her that she and Will were considering making a substantial gift to the shelter, and asked Donna if she'd consider putting together a proposal for them. What was her vision for the future? If she could do anything at all, connect with any other organization, what would it be? There were a number of other shelters for homeless and battered women in New York, but Lizzy thought this one was special because it was small, and was really in touch with the people in the neighborhood and their needs. Also, she liked its emphasis on helping women get the skills and support they needed to get, and keep, good jobs. That meant, among other things, making sure they could get reliable, high-quality child care. Lizzy wanted to know, what did Donna, herself, see as special about it? How could they help build on those strengths and maybe reach out to existing organizations to provide an integrated, seamless path to stability and safety for women and children trying to rebuild their lives after the trauma and chaos of homelessness and abuse? Donna was of course very excited, and said she would need a few weeks, maybe a month or more, to get a proposal together.

Lizzy left the shelter feeling very optimistic. She had a lot to share with Will that evening. Not only had she made the first steps toward a new project with Bella's Place, but she could swear that that morning Emma had said "mama" once, and she'd been reaching for absolutely everything nearby when they had dropped by an open playdate at the community center during their morning together. Over dinner, they tried to get her to say "mama" again, but all she said was "phhhtthh" and "buh buh buh."

* * *

_Please phhhtthhh or buh buh buh just below, if you like._


	11. Chapter 11

_A/N: thanks as always to Jan, Barbara, and Alison._

* * *

**Chapter 11**

**early February 2013**

On Saturday, Richard called just before noon. He had come to the city on some constituent business Friday and decided to stay overnight to see his parents. He asked if he could come over, because he had something he needed to talk to Will about. Of course Will agreed.

What Richard wanted to tell them was that he'd heard from Georgie again. She had called that morning. "She says she's ready for rehab," Richard reported, his voice full of skepticism.

Will's eyebrows shot up. "Really." This was the first time since she had failed out of college in her freshman year that she'd indicated any willingness to give it another try. "What's going on? Did she say?" She had raised their hopes so many times before, only to dash them, hard. It was impossible to believe anything she had to say.

"Not exactly. She says she met someone, a man..."

"Oh, of course she did—"

Richard threw his hands up in the air. "I don't know. Maybe it's different this time." There had been other men, other boys, who she had wanted to clean up for in the past, when she was younger. She was 29 now.

"Anyway, she wants to try Tranquility, that place in Connecticut, and she also wants to visit you and Lizzy, if you'll see her." Tranquility was where Will had gotten help for Lizzy's sister Lydia all those years ago

"Have you seen her since last time?"

"No, no. But I told her I'd see her later this afternoon, before I head back to Washington tonight. Do you want to come?"

"Oh, God. I don't know."

"It's OK. I'll take care of it this time, see if she's serious."

Will sighed. "All right. I'll call the experts on Monday." That meant the lawyers and the counselors.

Richard stayed for lunch, Chinese delivered from his favorite place, and then headed out to see Georgie.

After he left, Lizzy cleared off the table in the breakfast nook where they'd eaten, while Will held a lightly dozing Emma.

As she carried the dishes into the kitchen, Lizzy asked,"What do you think? Are you going to see her?"

Will sighed heavily. He had been doing that a lot ever since Richard had showed up. "I don't know. How many times am I going to let her put me through this? On the other hand, what if she really means it this time?"

"Look, sweetie, you're the one with the experience dealing with this. I'll support you whatever you decide." She put the bowls on the top rack of the dishwasher and closed it back up again.

Will heaved yet another sigh. "It's been ten years since she showed any interest at all in rehab. Maybe it's time to give it another try. Maybe she's really ready this time. I don't know."

Lizzy put her arms lightly around Will, Emma cradled in Will's arms between them. They both gazed down at her, watching her sleep. Her plump, soft baby mouth was open slightly and her long eyelashes nestled on the tops of her round baby cheeks. She looked like a little angel. Too bad she didn't sleep angelically more often. "Let's see what Richard has to say after they meet. Maybe we'll have a better sense of what's going on." She shepherded him into the living room, and they sat down on the sofa, snuggling close and looking at Emma some more.

"God, I don't want to go through this again," he choked out, pained.

"I know, sweetheart. I'm sorry." Lizzy put her head on Will's shoulder, stroking his arm. They sat silently for a long time. Lizzy curled up against his side, and putting her arms around her two most beloved people in the whole universe. She wished she could protect them from all the painful things out there in this cold, hard world.

Richard called early that evening from La Guardia. Georgie seemed serious about rehab, he said. "But what do I know?" he added. He gave Will Georgie's phone number. For the rest of the evening, Will and Lizzy took turns holding Emma as they talked for a long time about whether they should let Georgie into their lives at all, even a little bit, and if so, how.

On Monday, Will did call the experts while he was at work. Because all along they had made Georgie's entering rehab a condition of any other kinds of engagement, they agreed that giving it a try was probably the right thing to do. They worked up a proposal for the terms under which the family trust would pay for Georgie's rehab.

That evening over dinner at home, Will said, "So, I'm going to give her a call. Offer to meet." Lizzy hadn't seen his affect so flat for a long, long time. Maybe not since when he had talked to Georgie for the first time in front of her.

"OK. Does it feel like the right thing to do?" she asked.

"Yeah. Even if it turns out that she just burns me again, I think I'll feel better if I give her a chance."

"Do you want me there? Do you want to meet her here?"

"Not this time, I think."

She considered this for a moment. "Is a neutral place better, is that what you're thinking?"

"Yeah. I also don't feel like taking the time to lock up all the prescription medicine, alcohol, jewelry, art, and anything else that someone might sell for drug money." His mouth twisted into an unhappy grimace.

"Oh." Lizzy had had no idea that things had been that bad with Georgie, but now that he said it, it seemed obvious. She took his hand. "Right. Of course. Sorry."

He glumly shook his head. "No, it's all right."

Emma squawked in her highchair, and Will stopped eating to take her out and hold her in his lap. He fed her mashed bananas while holding her in his arms.

* * *

That week, on Wednesday night, for the first time ever, Emma slept through the night. That was pediatrician-speak for sleeping for five consecutive hours. Actually it was more like four hours and 40 minutes, but Lizzy was willing to call it five. Of course on Thursday Emma woke up what seemed like every twenty seconds all night long, just to make up for it.

Lizzy was a basket case on Friday morning from lack of sleep, and Emma was fussy, fussy, fussy. She was drooling like crazy and kept chewing on everything. When Elena arrived after lunch, Lizzy told her about it. Elena said, "Oh, well, that sounds like she's teething. Did you check out her gums?"

Sure enough, there in the front of her lower gums, they could see a little tooth straining to break through. Lizzy was so excited that she called Will to show him the news on FaceTime, but all he could see was drool.

* * *

Will met with Georgie later that afternoon at the Starbucks near WPD's offices. That night he told Lizzy about the visit while they were relaxing in the living room and playing with Emma on the floor.

"She looked really bad. _Really _bad. So skinny..." His voice was full of misery and what Lizzy thought sounded like regret.

"Oh, sweetheart. I'm so sorry." Lizzy put her hand on his shoulder.

"I'm still not really sure what, you know, precipitated all of this. I think I told you, she met a man when she was staying at the Winthrops' place in the Hamptons, a friend of theirs. She says they're in love. He OD'd, sort of hit bottom, I guess, and now they want to get straightened out together. I don't know."

"What did you tell her?"

He heaved yet another huge sigh. "I said that if she wanted to go into rehab, then the family trust would pay for it, under a lot of conditions. And if she doesn't meet the conditions, then the money stops."

Lizzy winced. "Ouch. What did she say to that?"

Will shrugged, "She said, 'I guess I deserve that.'"

"Huh. That's interesting."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing, really. It just shows _some _level of self-awareness, that's all."

Will grimaced. "She's never been stupid or unaware. That's part of the problem, actually. She can run circles around the rest of us, always could."

"Hmmph. So, did you agree on Tranquility?"

"Yeah. We can get her in there in two or three weeks."

"No extra outlays this time to get her in sooner?" Lizzy asked, not so obliquely referring to how Will had gotten her own sister Lydia admitted on very short notice.

Will shook his head and said, a little dejected, "No. She'll just have to wait till a former child star leaves, same as everyone else."

He paused. "If it goes OK, then I'm going to have to take some trips to Connecticut to do the family therapy thing."

Lizzy took his hand. "Yeah, I know. Don't worry. I have things covered here."

* * *

A room opened up at Tranquility a little sooner than expected, and by the third week in February, Georgie had been admitted. Saturday afternoon, Will drove to Connecticut to attend family therapy with her. That evening, he came home looking pretty rough. He kicked off his shoes, flopped down and stretched out on the sofa with his arm over his eyes.

"God, therapy sucks," was all he would say. He told Lizzy he needed to process it all before he was ready to talk about it. She perched on the edge of the sofa next to him and put Emma on his chest. He held on tight, his face closed, rubbing Emma's back. Some light finally came back into his eyes when she held her wobbly head up high to look around and then drooled excessively all over his shirtfront. Lizzy observed and wiped up, but she didn't press him to talk right then.

The next day, Lizzy, Will and Emma met Charlotte, Liam, and Chloe for bagels at the old friends' standby deli. Things were still a little strained between Lizzy and Charlotte, but it was good to get together anyway, to move on from their New Years Eve disagreement. Chloe had an afternoon playdate with a friend and Charlotte had some work to do, so before too long their family had headed off.

The Darcy-Bennet family set off for Central Park. It was a clear, chilly day, and an occasional gust of wind blew leaves and litter into little funnel clouds near the benches and trash cans scattered along the sidewalk. The trees were still bare and gray, and it felt like spring was not going to come this year, ever

Emma was strapped to Will's chest, facing out and taking in the whole world. Whenever she saw something interesting, she kicked her legs out and stuck her arms up and squealed, over and over. Beside them, Lizzy pushed the stroller, the diaper bag strapped in like a phantom baby as usual.

A pair of women, one middle-aged and the younger one quite evidently her daughter, started making eyes at Emma as they approached on the sidewalk.

"Oh, she's so cute!"

"What a sweetie pie!"

"Oh, and she loves her daddy!"

"Yes, how great that your daddy carries you around! So cute!"

Lizzy smiled and stood there, invisible, in the face of a daddy who spent the afternoon with his baby. Of course the women wouldn't have been nearly so interested if Lizzy had been carrying Emma. Finally the women moved off, having exhausted their daily supply of goo-goo and ga-ga.

Lizzy and Will strolled along. She asked him, "There's something I've been thinking about, and I hope it's not too soon after your session yesterday to ask you. Do you remember that a long time ago, you told me you thought Georgie's troubles happened because she didn't have anything meaningful to do with her life? No work?"

"Yeah, sure." How could they forget? He'd written that to her in the long email he'd sent her after the breakup that had ended the first disastrous part of their relationship.

"Do you think that's true, still?"

Some teenagers were playing Frisbee out on the grass, the wind playing havoc with their game. Next to them, a kid and her father were attempting to fly a kite, but not having much luck.

"Maybe a little. But like you said, there's a lot more to it than that. From some things she said yesterday, it sounds like a big part of what she's struggling with is feelings of abandonment. You know, Mom and Dad died, I went off to school when she was really little, Mrs. Martinez started living out when she started elementary school..."

"Oh, that's rough. I'm sorry."

"Actually, she thinks I abandoned her, again, later on."

"What?! You did _everything _for her."

"No, that's what she said. I abandoned her after our parents died, by leaving her at Deerfield, and then by sending her off to Harvard and then to rehab after she got kicked out of school. Shoving her off on somebody else instead of doing anything myself."

"She thinks that sending her to _Harvard _and _rehab _was abandonment? OK, now she's just jerking you around. That's total crap."

"Yeah, I know. But that's how her mind works. She's really messed up. Still, I do think there's something to the first part of it. Mom and Dad really _weren't _there for her."

"Did you feel that way, too?"

"Yeah, some. They were always busy with this and that. I think I told you before, a lot of times I only saw Dad when he said good night. Mom, too, sometimes. But I didn't take drugs or drink too much, if that's what you're thinking."

"No, I know. Everybody reacts to these things in different ways. Just look at me and my sisters."

"True." He thought about this for a while as they walked. They came to the lake and stopped to look at a pair of mallard ducks swimming toward a clump of brown, dried-out cattails and rushes. Emma waved her arms and kicked in excitement.

He continued, "True. But I could see how it might be a reasonable thing for someone, a person, to feel a lot of pain about that, to feel like they weren't important to anyone in the world, under those circumstances. Or if the only people who did seem to care only seemed to like me because of my money."

"_Your_ money?" She poked him.

He repressed a laugh. "Oops. Guess that sort of slipped out."

"Yeah, well, I totally hadn't guessed you were talking about yourself before that," she teased.

"I know. I'm so subtle with my neuroses," he said with a wry twist to his smile.

She laughed, "No, you're a refreshing change from my sledgehammer approach to neurosis."

She quieted down and put her arm around him, leaning against his shoulder as they stood watching the ducks swim along. He turned his head and softly kissed her hair. She looked up at him with serious eyes. "You have us now, you know. You're not alone, and we love you more than you can possibly comprehend."

"I know." He paused to look on as a water bug skated its way by them and a tiny breath of wind ruffled the surface of the water. "You two are my world."

They watched as the mallard drake disappeared into the reeds. Then they turned and headed for home, arms around each other's waists.

* * *

Lizzy and Emma went to visit Will at his office on Thursday afternoon following a morning spent with Louisa and her friends. Lizzy had spread her nursing cape out on the leather sofa for Emma to lie on, and now Emma was lying on her tummy with her head up and moving her arms and legs around like a swimmer doing the breaststroke while Lizzy regaled Will with a story about their morning.

A knock came on the door, and Ahmed stuck his head in around the door.

"Oh, sorry, Will. I'll come back later."

Lizzy waved him in with a smile. "No, no, it's nothing important. Please don't let me keep you from your business. We'll sit here quietly."

Ahmed hemmed and hawed for a moment before he finally came out with it. "Well, actually...it's sort of something personal."

Lizzy jumped up. "Oh! I'm sorry. We'll be on our way, then."

"No, no, I don't want to put you out. It's OK if you want to stay."

"What's on your mind, Ahmed?" asked Will, amused at this battle to see who could be more polite.

"Umm...well...Phil and I have some good news. It looks like the adoption is really going through this time. Unless something goes wrong, in about four weeks we're going to have a daughter."

Lizzy jumped up from the sofa. "Oh, Ahmed! That's such great news! Congratulations! I'm so happy for you!" She sprinted over to him to give him a celebratory hug. Then she hurried back to the sofa to keep Emma from falling off onto the floor, even though Will had things well in hand there.

Now he stood up and gave Ahmed a warm two-handed handshake. "That's great, really great. I know how long you've been hoping for this."

Ahmed grinned happily but a little blearily back at them. "Yeah, it's very exciting. But we have a lot to do before she arrives. There were some things we put off because we were afraid the adoption might fall through, like last time."

Lizzy saic, "Yeah, of course. If you need any baby stuff right away, we're happy to share the wealth. We've got a lot of things we've never used, including newborn-sized clothes."

Will broke in, "Oh, I'm sure they'll want new things, Lizzy."

"No, actually, we're not picky," replied Ahmed with a laugh. "Thank you. We might take you up on that." He paused, "Actually, there's more. I wanted to talk to you about taking some time off, Will."

"Sure, of course. What do you need?" He gestured for Ahmed to sit down in a chair next to the desk.

"Well, you know Phil works for that small IT firm, right?"

Will nodded, not certain where this was going.

"So, basically he doesn't get any parental leave, beyond using up his sick days. That's about a week and a half."

Lizzy asked, "He's not eligible for FMLA leave because of the size of the firm, right?"

"Right. If he takes a longer unpaid leave, they won't hold his job for him. So, that leaves it up to me, basically, since we don't think it would be good for us to put her right into child care. We need time to bond, especially since it's an adoption. I talked to HR about it, and they told me that I can take up to 12 weeks of unpaid FMLA leave for parenting."

"So long?" asked Will, aghast.

"_Will_, it's the _law_." Lizzy knew you didn't mess with the law.

Ahmed continued, "Well, the thing is...we can't afford it if I take unpaid leave. And I just wondered if it really was company policy that there's no paid parenting leave for men. That's more or less what HR said. I know there's a generous leave policy for mothers, but is there really nothing for fathers?"

Lizzy knew she had probably already said too much in this conversation. This was Will's business. But if what Ahmed said was correct, WPD had a very, very big problem, and they needed to fix it fast, before somebody said something that would get them sued.

"Hmm, well, I don't know..." said Will. Lizzy could see the gears turning in his head, and she suspected he might later regret the words that seemed ready to tumble out of his mouth.

So she broke in, the lawyer in her overcoming the "relationship" part of her that was screaming for her to keep her mouth shut.

"Um, Ahmed, could Will and I have a moment?"

"Sure, sure, I'll just be at my desk." Ahmed made his way out of the office and closed the door behind him.

Will turned on the sofa and shot her a grumpy look. "What the hell was that all about?"

Lizzy raised her eyebrows at him and snapped right back, "That was about keeping you from getting hit with a sex discrimination lawsuit."

"What are you talking about?" Will furrowed his brow.

"Look, you need to make sure that WPD is not, in fact, only giving paid parental leave to women, and for sure you need to find out whether someone in HR is telling people that that's what they're doing. You need to get on the horn _right now_ and find out more about what the company policy is before you say another word to Ahmed. And then you need your lawyer to sit down and look at your leave policies and make sure they are compliant with federal law."

"I know counsel looked it over when we implemented the maternity leave policies, what, almost ten years ago," Will dismissed the issue out of hand.

"These things have changed fast since then. You need to check it out and find out how the laws are being interpreted now, and you also need to make sure that WPD is keeping up with best practices in your sector. Your policies might have been state-of-the-art ten years ago, but if you haven't updated them since then, you may be in trouble now." Lizzy turned back to Emma and pushed against her feet in imitation of pedaling a bicycle.

"Huh. Really. OK, I'll give the lawyers a call." He still sounded a little miffed, but she could see he got that this was serious.

"Good. And, by the way, you should know that if he asks for the full 12 weeks of leave, you're legally obligated to give it to him, with job security, even if it inconveniences you. No retaliation."

"Yeah, I got that. How about this? Let's look at the HR documentation in the employee handbook and see how bad things are. Would you be willing to do that?"

"Of course."

They went over to Will's desk, where she pulled up a chair and they peered at his desktop computer. In Will's arms, Emma fussed some, and Lizzy figured she was probably hungry, so she prepared for a feeding. Emma nursed and then fell asleep while Lizzy and Will looked through the handbook.

After they'd gone over the parts of the manual related to maternity leave, Lizzy said, "Hmm. OK, I can see the, sort of, vestiges of where this policy came from. You started it because you were trying to retain some women associates, right?"

Will nodded. "Right. Some of our top associates said they would leave if we didn't have more accommodations for them during their childbearing years. So that's why we have paid maternity leave, and also why we have things like a part-time track to partnership with no loss of seniority. Those are pretty good policies, right?"

"Yes, up to a point. The thing is, it's written as a disability leave. That means only women who give birth get it-no adoptive parents, no men."

"Oh, I see. It didn't occur to me that that little phrase would have that effect."

"Yup. Also, the way it's written, part-time track to partnership is only available to people, i.e. _women_, who have taken the disability leave. You know, you should have the employment attorney look over your policies about family caregiving leave, too."

"Huh. This is complicated."

"Yes, it is. And technical, but, as you can see, this little technical stuff can make a big difference for people."

"Right." Will looked like he was turning things over in his mind, his eyes faraway.

"Can you see how WPD's policies makes raising children a women's problem? The policies are definitely better than nothing, but they're also not enough."

"Yeah, I see that."

Lizzy softened her voice. "It's hard, you know, for any of us to imagine what people who aren't like us might need. So maybe when you're updating your handbook, you can think about what you might need to get by if you were someone else's shoes. Say, me, on the one hand, or Ahmed, on the other. What kinds of things might have been able to keep me on the job? What is Ahmed going to need, if he's going to keep working for you? It's not going to be easy to find someone as good as him if he decides to quit, you know."

"You think he'll really quit over this?" Will asked, alarmed.

"If Phil can't get more than a week or two week off, and if they don't want to put a two-week-old baby into child care, which they probably can't anyway, then he'll probably have to, right?"

"Why can't they get child care for a two-week old?"

"Most centers don't take kids until they are about two months old. Charlotte told me. They had a really hard time finding a home daycare for Chloe at six weeks, and they couldn't afford a nanny."

"Huh."

"Look, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have jumped in like that. It's not my business."

"No, don't worry about it. I'm glad you did."

"OK, well, I know you're busy, so we'll get out of your hair." She stood up, holding a sleeping Emma in her arms, and grabbed the diaper bag.

Distracted, Will agreed. He stood up and walked over to kiss both Lizzy and Emma goodbye. He looked at the baby in Lizzy's arms for a moment, stroking Emma's fuzzy head, even though Lizzy was inching toward the door. "I wish I could go with you."

She'd never heard that from him before. How interesting.

She shrugged, "Oh, we're just heading home. Nothing special planned."

"I know."

Lizzy took his hand. "Hey, it's OK. We'll see you at dinner, all right? What do you want tonight?"

"I don't know. Anything is fine."

Lizzy moved back to him and put her arm around him, Emma fast asleep between them. They stood like that for some time, looking down at her and enjoying being together. Then she pulled away and looked at him. Even though he was looking at Emma, he still had that faraway look, as though he were thinking about some kind of possibility he'd never considered before. His smile seemed uncertain, but she couldn't quite tell what was going on in his head.

She leaned up and gave him a kiss, then asked, "Are you OK?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. It's just a lot to think about."

By now Lizzy knew that Will got quiet when he had something big on his mind, and she also knew that no amount of grilling would get him to come out with it until he was good and ready. She wasn't sure exactly what he was thinking about, but she'd bet good money it wasn't limited to whether Ahmed should get paid parental leave or not.

"All right. Let me know when you want to talk about it." She started toward the door, his hand in hers. "Call that employment lawyer, OK?"

"Yeah, I will. And I'll tell Ahmed not to make any rash decisions, because I'm on the case."

"Great. Love you. See you tonight."

"Love you too."

She let go of his hand, opened the door, and turned to give him one last look at Emma before she headed out into his assistant's office, and then down to the street where the town car was waiting.

* * *

That day, Will had his staff assistant make an appointment with the WPD's employment lawyer, Marjorie Jacobs. Friday he met with her, and he told Lizzy about the meeting that evening over dinner at the Japanese restaurant near their apartment. They had brought a portable high chair with a tray, and Emma played with some blocks on the tray while Lizzy and Will ate their appetizers of yakitori and cold, fresh tofu with bonito flakes and soy sauce. Lizzy spent approximately half of the time they were in the restaurant under the table retrieving Emma's blocks. Will couldn't fit under the table.

"So, you were right about the leave policy. Marjorie says it leaves us wide open for a sex discrimination or sexual orientation discrimination suit. She recommends that we do a total overhaul of the policy to make sure it's up to date, including covering adoptive parents. So, in the short run, she advised me to give Ahmed the same paid eight weeks of parental leave that we give biological mothers, as sort of a one-off. That will give us some time to have HR investigate best practices and revise all the policies."

Lizzy came up from under the table with a block in her hand and sat back down in her chair. "How did this happen? I thought that you had a really good director of HR, but lately it doesn't sound like it."

"Well, we did, when we first made those policies ten years ago. But she was such a hotshot that she got lured away, to a big software firm in Silicon Valley. I'll talk to the board and see if we can't light a fire under our current guy."

"Hmm. So, are you going to follow Marjorie's advice and give Ahmed the leave?"

He shrugged and sighed. "Yeah, I think we have to. So now I need to find a new PA for while he's gone. Shuffle some people around, maybe. Or get a temp."

"It's a real pain in the butt, huh?"

"Mmm," he agreed noncommittally and shoveled some tofu into his mouth with his chopsticks.

Eyeing him with some amusement, she pretended to grumble, "Damn people with their damn basic biological functions. How dare they get sick or reproduce when it inconveniences me?"

He quirked a smile and said, "OK, laugh it up, but _you _try finding someone who can do what Ahmed does."

Lizzy put her hands up in the air to indicate she was backing off. "I'm just saying. Actually, that's my point. Finding someone who can keep you going for six weeks is nothing compared to having to start all over with a new PA if Ahmed quits. It's, uh, an investment in valuable human capital."

Will raised his eyebrows as if to say he hadn't quite looked at it that way before. Always make the business case for things with Will, Lizzy reminded herself. Then Emma lunged across her tray for the soy sauce bottle on the table and knocked over Lizzy's water glass, so the conversation was over for now. But maybe they were getting somewhere, slowly.

* * *

_Thoughts, comments, questions? Leave them below, please._


	12. Chapter 12

_A/N: As always, my gratitude to Jan, Barbara, and Alison for their great feedback on this chapter._

* * *

**Chapter 12**

**March 2013**

The first week in March, Will needed to go to Copenhagen to check out the offshore wind project that WPD was funding. He also wanted to visit a couple of other North Sea sites and meet with a group of European scientists who were working on some interesting new wind- and wave-power technologies. The E.U. was way ahead of the U.S. on renewables, he explained to Lizzy. He flew out on Sunday afternoon so that he'd have all day Monday to work, and he planned to come back on Friday night so he could head to Connecticut on Saturday morning for family therapy with Georgie. And, horrors! He had to fly commercial, because the little WPD corporate jet was too small to cross the Atlantic. Too bad the Concorde had stopped flying. At least he had a first class seat that folded down completely flat, though.

Lizzy knew that it would be challenging to have Emma on her own for a whole week, but of course she wouldn't be _entirely _on her own, right? Elena would still come on her regular schedule, and she had asked Gabby to help her out on Tuesday and Thursday evenings after she'd had Emma all day. She was a much more confident mother by now, anyway. Everything would be all right.

Around three o'clock on Sunday afternoon, Lizzy and Emma saw Will off in front of the building. He kissed them both and turned to get into the town car to head to Newark. Emma reached out for him and started to cry, so he came back to take her out of Lizzy's arms and give her some more kisses. When he raised his eyes to Lizzy's to give Emma back to her, she could see that they looked a little moist. Sweet man. Then he got into the back of the car and was off, waving as the car pulled away.

Lizzy and Emma stopped to say hello to Rodrigo, the weekend doorman, when they went back into the building.

"Oh! Look at her!" he said, pushing back his doorman's cap. "She's getting so big. Before you know it, she'll be all grown up. Seeing her, I miss my kids when they were babies."

"How old are they now?" Lizzy asked.

"Oh, you know. Twenty-five, twenty-seven, and thirty. But it still seems like yesterday they were little like this. I can't wait for grandkids."

They chatted for a little while longer before Lizzy and Emma headed upstairs.

Just as they arrived at their floor and stepped out of the elevator, Lizzy's phone rang. It was Elena, clearly in a panic, although she was trying to speak in a calm voice.

"Lizzy, my family, we have an emergency. My mother went back home to Santo Domingo to see my sister, and something happened. She's very sick. Maybe a stroke. The doctors don't know how much longer she's going to live. I'm so sorry, I need to ask for emergency family leave. I need to go to her. And Gabby, too. They're so close. Is it OK? I'm sorry—"

Lizzy let herself into the apartment. "Elena, no, no, don't be sorry. Of course you should go, as soon as you can. Have you bought plane tickets yet? Will and I will get them for you if you haven't. I know they'll be really expensive on short notice."

"No, no, I have enough money saved up. I'll do it."

"Please, let us take care of it. If you can tell me when you want to fly, I'll get the tickets booked, OK? Really, I mean it. I'll talk to a travel agent or something. Please just worry about getting yourselves ready to go."

Elena paused, unsure about this. It crossed the line between the personal and the professional really uncomfortably. "Are you sure? It's not in the contract, and I don't want to be any trouble to you."

"I understand. No, it's not any trouble. Please, I'd feel really bad if you had to worry about the cost. Let's just get you to your mother as fast as possible, OK?"

In the end, Elena agreed, although she made it clear she was worried about being an imposition.

After they hung up, Lizzy thought for a minute about how she should handle this. She'd said she would call a travel agent, but it was Sunday so everything would be closed. Should she call Ahmed and ask for his help? She knew that Will would, no question. His PA was available to him 24/7, in his mind. But it was the weekend, and Ahmed and Phil were hurrying to get the nursery ready for their new daughter, who was due to be born any time. When she thought about it some more, though, she wondered if she could actually even book a ticket online for someone else using her credit card, especially on an international flight. She realized she hadn't asked for Elena's passport number of any of that other security stuff you needed these days. Crap. It was probably best to call Ahmed and see if he could help.

So she did call Ahmed as she paced around the apartment with Emma strapped to her chest. Ahmed said he was at Pottery Barn shopping for baby furniture when she asked if he was busy and apologized for intruding on his weekend. But apparently he was used to being interrupted like this, because he very happily assured her that it was no problem, he'd take care of it in a jiffy if she would just give him Elena and Gabby's phone numbers.

As she hung up, she suddenly realized that she had just been an active participant in making sure she would have absolutely no help with child care for the foreseeable future. She sat down heavily on the sofa to think about what the hell she was going to do about it.

The nanny agency through which they'd hired Elena guaranteed that they would provide backup care if a nanny called in sick or couldn't come to work for some other reason. So probably she should just call them and tell them she needed help, right? On the other hand, if she did, she would probably have to tell them that they were paying Elena full time, but only had her come in three afternoons a week. That was a violation of their contract, technically, and they were supposed to have revised the contract if they changed the terms of employment. Hmm. Maybe it was better not to do that. She supposed she could just ask the service to find them a babysitter for a few hours at a time. It was hard to know how long Elena would be gone, so it was impossible to predict exactly when she'd need help. Probably she should count on at least a week. She checked out the nanny agency's website and was reminded that they needed 24-hour notice to send over a babysitter. But when she thought about it, she wasn't sure she was ready to hand Emma over to a stranger, anyway.

Lizzy decided she'd give it a try and see how well she did for a few days without a sitter. If things got hard, she'd call for help. She was an experienced mother now, and she had places they could go, people they could see. Monday, she and Emma could go on a spontaneous all-day outing. The library, maybe? The aquarium? No, that was still closed for repairs after Hurricane Sandy. The Bronx Zoo or the zoo in Central Park? No, it was still too cold to be outside for very long. They already had plans for outings and events scattered throughout the week. Maybe she'd see what Jane thought about the idea of a visit from her sister and niece. If she broke it down into discrete chunks, she could probably handle it, and she'd call for help if she really needed it. OK, she could deal with this.

She texted Will and told him not to worry, but Elena and Gabby had had to head off to the Dominican Republic. He phoned her back immediately from the gate at the airport.

"Do you want me to turn around and come home right now?" he asked.

"No, no. Do what you need to do. I have things under control. I think. Mostly I'm just worried for Elena. By the way, I had Ahmed buy tickets for her and Gabby. I hope that's OK."

"Good, good. Thank you for taking care of that. Look, they're making the boarding announcement for first class, but I'll call you when I get in. Maybe we can Skype with Emma, if she's still awake?"

"Sounds good. Have a safe flight. Love you."

"Damn commercial airlines, it's like a damn cattle drive in here," he grumbled, apparently in response to a big rush to the service desk going on around him. Only he would say that about first class, she thought. "Call me if you need me, OK? Any time. Love you too. Bye."

Of course she wouldn't call and interrupt him, but it was nice he'd said that, she thought. She looked down at Emma in her arms and said, "Well, my dear, we have an interesting few days ahead of us! Let's bond, shall we?"

Later, Elena called to say that Ahmed had booked their tickets and that she and Gabby would be off to Santo Domingo in the morning.

"Please let me know how your mom is doing, Elena. I hesitate to call because I don't want to intrude, but we'll be thinking of her, and you, and hoping for the best."

That evening she and Emma had fun together. They took about two hours to eat dinner, and they played after that, and it was all very cozy and nice. Lizzy called Jane to ask if she might be interested in having visitors one day that week. Jane was delighted and asked Lizzy if she'd like to come on Wednesday, when she imagined Lizzy might need a break. Some of Jane's friends from her grad school days would be visiting. She thought Lizzy would enjoy them. Lizzy happily agreed to the plan.

Jane said, "It's hard taking care of a baby for a long time with no breaks at all. If you want to come earlier and stay overnight, you're always welcome, OK?"

"Thanks, Jane. I appreciate that. For now let's just plan on Wednesday, how's that?"

Afterwards, she and Emma had some more cuddles, and then she brushed her teeth and got into her pajamas before nursing Emma down for the night and falling asleep herself.

Will called at 11 o'clock right after he got in, very early in the morning in Copenhagen.

"Oh God, did I wake you? I'm sorry. Are you OK?"

Still groggy, she told him all was well, asked how the flight had been, and listened patiently when he complained that the Champagne had been too warm and the paté too cold. She laughed to herself and managed one "poor baby," hoping it sounded sympathetic enough.

The next day, Lizzy and Emma had a busy, idyllic day together. After a quick morning chat with Will at 7 o'clock, which was just after lunchtime for him in Copenhagen, they hit the children's museum for an hour and then the local public library's kids' book section. Nobody was going to object to a nursing mother or a sleeping baby in either of those places, so Emma had her mid-morning feedings and a quick snooze while they were out. After that, they went out for lunch near the library, and then headed up to Bella's Place for Lizzy's regular volunteer work at the shelter in the afternoon. At first she'd planned to take a taxi to all these places, but then she had thought better of it when she'd remembered she'd have to lug the carseat and all the other baby crap with her. So she had called the car service and asked for a town car to drive them around all day. She thought Will would probably be pleased to hear that. Thus it was a ritzy town car that delivered her to the rather rundown Bella's Place, which felt a little weird.

"Oooh, look at who we have here!" squealed Tanya, Donna's assistant, when Lizzy peeked around the doorway of her office. Emma was strapped to Lizzy's chest as usual. Tanya immediately started in with the coochy-coo stuff.

"My, my! What a little beauty! Look at those big, smart eyes!" called Donna as she came out of the inner director's office to check out why the baby alarm had been sounded. Emma kicked and gurgled as if she knew Donna was talking about her. "Oh, she's going to give you hell, isn't she?"

Lizzy rolled her eyes and confirmed that she was already well on the way to doing so.

The volunteer coordinator, Adriana, and a couple of other staffers wandered in to check out the excitement.

"Finally, we get to meet her! Look at those cheeks, so plump and juicy-looking I just want to eat them up!" said Adriana as she leaned in to peer at Emma. She and all of the other women looked, but didn't touch. They had enough babies come through the shelter that they knew better. "To what do we owe the honor today?" she asked.

"Well, Will is out of town this week, and our nanny had to take some family time suddenly, so I just thought I'd bring her in instead of canceling today."

"So you're alone with the baby all week?" Adriana wanted to know.

Lizzy confirmed that, and all the women clucked and shook their heads knowingly and chorused their disapproval.

"No, no, you need some help."

"That's not a good idea, honey."

"That's crazy. Don't try to be a hero."

"Do you need a babysitter? My daughter is home for spring break. She could help you out."

Lizzy laughed and replied, "OK, OK, I get it. You're right, I need help so I can take a shower, at least. All right, I'll get something arranged for later in the week."

Adriana set her to work at a big table in a back room sorting donations with another volunteer. This was challenging with Emma still strapped in place, but they managed. After a while she took a break to nurse Emma in the common room. As she sank down into the saggy sofa, she was amused to notice that it was a ringer for her dilapidated old green couch, the one she'd had from law school and gotten rid of when she'd moved in with Will. As she sat and chatted with a couple of the women who, with their kids, were living in the shelter, she thought that she would talk to Donna about getting some new furniture before she left today.

By 5 o'clock, Lizzy and Emma were headed home in the town car, driven by a friendly Haitian man who during the course of the day had revealed that his name was Stephane. Mom and baby were both exhausted and cranky. Emma yowled the entire way home, and Lizzy realized she had been a bit overambitious with their plans for the day. The women at Bella's Place were right, she shouldn't try to do this alone. What the hell had she been thinking? How did single moms manage? She couldn't begin to imagine. Now she still had to organize dinner for herself and give Emma a bath and do a long list of other things, including trying to touch base with Will.

It was time to get her act together, obviously. From the car, she called Chinese Dumpling Gourmet and put in an order for delivery. She called the nanny agency and asked them to send her a fill-in babysitter for all day Thursday and for Friday morning. She didn't explain why she needed one, and they didn't inquire. It was hard to hear what anyone said over the racket of Emma's shrieks, but she managed.

Later, Will called from Copenhagen. He was tired after not much sleep on the plane the night before, a long day at work, jet lag and too much white food for dinner. "God, so many potatoes. Who puts mayo on french fries, anyway?" he griped.

"Well, just about everyone in Northern Europe, in my experience," Lizzy answered, surreptitiously jamming the last dumpling into her mouth and trying to chew quietly. "I thought I had heard that the new Danish cuisine was fantastic, and that there were falafel stands on every corner in Copenhagen. Maybe try that next time."

"I know, but at these business things they just keep shoving these huge plates of cod at me all the time. And herring. Soooo much herring."

"I know. Too much pickled herring is tough to handle. Look, how about if we switch over to FaceTime so you can see Emma?"

He agreed.

"OK, hang on. I'm going to put the phone down while I get Emma out of her high chair."

After she set down the phone, Lizzy hastily pushed the cartons from her dumplings and Chinese broccoli and dipping sauce a little farther away to make sure Will wouldn't be able to see them. She unbuckled Emma from the high chair and pulled her onto her lap. Then she picked up the phone and started FaceTime.

As soon as Emma saw Will's face, she smiled and waved her arms and reached for him. Lizzy could have sworn she said "Da da!"

"Did you hear that?! She said 'da da'! Oh my God!"

"Are you sure?" asked Will. "It sounded like 'bluh bluh' to me."

"Nope, definitely 'da da'. She misses you. Let's see if we can get her to say it again."

A few minutes of this helped tease Will back into a better mood, even though Emma never repeated "da da." Lizzy knew that Will couldn't resist it when Emma giggled, so she unsnapped Emma's romper and blew bubbles on her tummy until she obliged with a delighted baby laugh. Sure enough, something pretty close to a smile finally appeared on Will's face.

After she calmed down, Emma started to fuss, so Lizzy put her over her shoulder and rubbed her back. She propped the phone up against her water glass so she could use both hands to hold Emma.

"Are you OK, sweetheart? You seem, I don't know, grumpy." she asked. He also looked gray and haggard.

"Yeah. I just miss you two, I guess. Are you doing all right by yourself?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. Tired. We miss you, too. We're going to take it easy tomorrow, stay at home, I think, and go to see Jane Wednesday. Then I'm going to have a babysitter Thursday and Friday."

"Good, good thinking. Are you sure you don't need me to come home early?"

"No, it's OK. I know your thing there is important, and we'll be all right."

"OK, if you're sure."

"You look exhausted. Why don't you go to bed?"

"Oh, you know, I'm all turned around. I don't know whether it's day or night. I didn't sleep much on the plane. I guess I could try to nap," he said doubtfully. Actually his eyelids were drooping and it looked like he might drop off any second.

"Right. Well, you go rest your eyes, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. Call when you can, OK?"

He yawned, his jaw cracking a little. "All right. Let me see Emma one more time."

Lizzy turned Emma back around and sat her down to look at Will on the phone. "Say night-night to Dada, Emma." Emma drooled and smiled in response.

"Good night, Emma. Good night, baby. Bye bye. I love you."

Emma started to cry when she heard him say goodbye.

"OK, good night, love," said Lizzy, turning Emma back to her shoulder and soothing her. "Hope you can sleep."

"Good night, sweetheart," he said. That was odd, thought Lizzy. He hardly ever used endearments. "I love you."

"I love you, too. Good night." They waved to each other and ended the call.

Lizzy finally got Emma to calm down, and then she held her over her shoulder while she cleaned up the dinner things, and while she used the toilet, and while she got out Emma's pajamas and got ready to give her a bath in the little baby bathtub. Lizzy wasn't sure whether all this holding was for Emma's sake, or for her own. They took their time with the bath, and that was nice, especially compared to their usual rush to the bedtime finish line. A lot of chores weren't so bad if you had all the time in the world, she thought.

She got Emma all dried off and dressed, and it was still only 8 o'clock. What to do for the next two hours? They went into the living room and Emma played for a while on the baby gym, quietly batting around the toys hanging from above.

The apartment seemed silent and empty with just the two of them in it. She and Emma were alone there together all the time, but somehow at night it felt different. Now and then she could hear neighbors' voices in the hallway, or the elevator bell dinging, or a speeding truck outside booming when it hit the pothole just down the street. These were the usual evening sounds in the building, but tonight they made her feel especially alone. She decided to take Emma into the entertainment room, dragging the baby gym in after them and settling Emma back into it. She turned on the TV and flipped around aimlessly, looking for something to watch on the approximately 1.5 million channels they got on cable.

Finally she gave up and put in a DVD instead. It was "The Awful Truth," starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. She pulled Emma up into her lap.

"OK, Emma, let's start your film history education. This is one of the great movies of all time. It's a screwball comedy, and that man is Cary Grant, who is the handsomest man in the whole world except for your daddy. This kind of movie is called a 'comedy of divorce and re-marriage.' See the little dog? Isn't he cute? His name is Asta, and he's very famous. Maybe next time we can watch 'The Thin Man,' and you can see him again. He can do great tricks. Watch him jump!"

After the movie was over, it was bedtime, and so Lizzy nursed Emma to sleep in the bed and then got up to take a shower, her first in a couple of days. She took the baby monitor into the bathroom with her, just in case Emma woke up. After she had finished showering and dried her hair, she went out into the dark living room in her pajamas and robe. She stood in the front window and watched the lights in Central Park across the street. They were pretty, but they didn't sparkle the way they did when Will watched them with her.

She turned and padded back to the bedroom, turning off the lights as she went. She got under the covers and snuggled Emma up to her chest, hoping her baby-warmth would comfort her to sleep. Slowly, she drifted off.

* * *

That night, Emma was very fussy. She woke up every two hours to nurse, just like she had when she was really little, and once she didn't go back to sleep for more than an hour after she nursed. Lizzy had to get up and hold her and rock her and sing "Rockabye Baby" all the way through nine hundred times before she finally fell back to sleep.

Perhaps because of her nighttime waking, Emma slept a little later than usual in the morning, till 6:45. Lizzy woke up feeling like she'd been hit by a truck, but Emma seemed perky and happy and gave no indication of why she might possibly have been so fussy all night. Who the hell knew why? She was a baby, that was why.

Lizzy changed Emma, fed and dressed her, and then managed to yank some clothes onto her own body and drag a comb through her hair before she snapped it into a ponytail holder.

Will called just as she was walking, Emma on her hip, into the kitchen. She sat down in the breakfast nook to take the call on FaceTime.

"Hi. I just have a minute here before a meeting, but I wanted to see how you two were doing. And I wanted to wish her a happy five-month birthday," Will said, smiling at Emma.

"Oh, man, I'd forgotten all about that," Lizzy moaned. "We had a rough night."

"Did she have gas again? What have you been feeding her?"

"Don't give me a hard time, OK?" Lizzy snapped. "I don't need that right now." She thought to herself, and how the hell would you know what gives her gas, anyway?

"Hey, take it easy. I'm just saying, I've just noticed that sometimes she gets gassy when she eats peas or prunes."

"Huh." Imagine that, he _had _been paying attention. More than she had, apparently. "I did feed her some peas last night."

"Well, maybe that's it." She saw him look away and talk to someone over his shoulder. "Damn, I have to go. Tonight I'm heading to Hamburg to meet with those research scientists about their North Sea windpower project. I'll try to catch up with you later tonight, OK?"

They signed off, and once again Emma cried when he said goodbye.

Somehow, the call made her feel like the day was stretching out interminably in front of her, and all of a sudden she felt like she didn't want to, or maybe couldn't, handle it all on her own. She hadn't realized how much Will's presence made a difference in her day, and how much his holding Emma, or taking a turn changing her, or a million other small things, lightened her load every morning and every evening.

She was blearily working her way through some cereal with Emma on her knee, trying to think about how to get through the day, when she remembered Jane's earlier invitation to come early and stay overnight. That sounded like a good idea, after the night she'd had. So she called Jane and asked if they could come today instead of Wednesday. Jane warmly agreed and said she'd have something yummy ready for lunch.

Lizzy quickly made a list of the things she needed to take to Jane's, and then she started packing. It took a while, because an overnight trip required a lot of baby gear, and because she also had to watch and hold Emma, who still wouldn't tolerate swings or bouncy seats. Finally she put Emma into the front carrier after she'd almost dropped her while trying to drag the pack 'n play out of the closet with one hand.

Around 11, she thought they were finally ready to go, so she called Jane and let her know they were on their way. Just as she was getting ready to start taking the bags down to the lobby, she got a telltale whiff from Emma's diaper. Oh, dear.

It was a Category IV blowout, spreading to distant locations, and it took almost 20 minutes to get Emma cleaned up, her diaper changed, and her new clothes on. By the time she was finally put back together, it was already almost noon. Lizzy hated being late because she thought it was discourteous to make other people wait. Before Emma, she had never been late. Just another way things were different now, she supposed.

It took Lizzy five minutes to load the elevator as, with Emma strapped to her chest, she dragged all their gear and bags down to the front desk with one hand. David, the doorman, saw her and rushed to her aid, but the hard part was already done.

"Lizzy, please, next time you can call me for things like this! I have a cart, and it's my job to help people with bags," he chided her, very politely of course.

She apologized, and then, carrying Emma and her hated car seat, she hiked over to the garage around the corner and retrieved the SUV. She parked the car out front while Emma howled from her car seat and David helped her load everything inside. One of the bags wouldn't fit in the car, so she left it with David.

In the back seat, Emma screamed louder with every passing block. She was hungry. She was angry. In a frenzy, she cried the whole way to Chappaqua except for about six minutes on the Saw Mill Parkway. Lizzy tried driving with one hand while reaching back to calm Emma by patting her on the head, but she gave up after she almost hit a gigantic Escalade while trying to avoid a dead raccoon on the road. By the time Lizzy pulled up in the Bingleys' massive suburban driveway, after 1 o'clock, she was frantic. She jumped out of the car and went around to climb into the back seat, where she nursed Emma until they both calmed down. The entire time, the driver-side door was open and the bell dinged to remind her that the key was still in the ignition.

After a few minutes, Jane opened the giant front door and came out of the house with Tyler on her hip to see what was going on, Aiden trailing behind. As usual she was sunny and cheery and had a golden halo from the sun shining behind her. Tyler and Aiden looked like little angels, too.

"There you are! Sorry it took me a few minutes to get out here. The boys and I just spent the morning making fun little organic giraffe snacks out of rice crispies and raisins, and I had to wash the honey off my hands."

"Oh, just kill me now," muttered Lizzy. She was officially the worst mother ever.

"Just a minute, Jane. Let me finish up here..."

But Emma wasn't about to give up her precious boob without a fight, so eventually Lizzy gave up and walked into Jane's beautiful cathedral-ceilinged foyer and living room with Emma still latched on, hoping the neighbors wouldn't see she had her shirt hiked up. The houses were all really far apart, so maybe she was safe. Jane thoughtfully retrieved Lizzy's keys and closed the car door.

"There you go. All set! We'll get your bags later. Would you like some lemonade? Come on into the dining room and have something to eat."

Lizzy followed her into the dining room, saying "Thanks a lot, Jane. We had a really bad drive. She just wouldn't stop crying." She plopped down on a dining room chair, Emma still firmly latched on in her lap.

Giving her a sympathetic look, Jane said, "I know, it's really hard sometimes, isn't it? Look, I made us some chicken sandwiches. A new organic bakery just opened up in town, and this is some of their multigrain bread." She put a plate with a sandwich on it in front of Lizzy. "And the meat is nitrite-free, low-sodium free-range chicken. It's delicious. It actually tastes like chicken. I think you'll like it."

Her mouth full, Lizzy mumbled her agreement. "Mmmph, delishhsm."

"The boys have already eaten, and I ate with them, but I'll sit with you. Boys, can you play with the train set in the living room?"

They did, and Jane sat chattering away about her organic food fetish while Lizzy scarfed down the sandwich and an organic apple and Emma nursed till she finally fell asleep. After that, they all moved into the living room, where Aiden silently and with great concentration assembled complex wooden train track systems and Tyler babbled and chewed on his wooden Thomas, Percy and Gordon engines.

Seeing Jane in action with Aiden and Tyler in the hour or so before their nap made Lizzy feel even more inadequate than usual. Jane encouraged and coaxed and praised them; she never raised her voice. Jane seemed to have limitless patience with Aiden, even when he threw himself on the floor and screamed and pounded his fists after Tyler ruined one of his train-track creations. Other than that, he wasn't talking very much, which Lizzy thought was strange, especially for an almost-four-year-old. On the other hand, what did she know about four-year-old boys? Jane soothed him and distracted him and got him calmed down. Lizzy thought that under the same circumstances, she'd have been reduced to a frustrated, shouting mess.

Just as the boys were going down for their nap, Emma woke up from hers. Lizzy changed Emma's diaper on the portable changing pad, right there on the white living-room carpet. A few minutes later, Jane came in and sat down next to Lizzy on the sofa, and asked if she could hold Emma. Lizzy handed her over, and Jane spoke softly to her and said what a good girl she was.

Jane sighed. "Oh, I miss this, the babies. Things just get so much more complicated when they get older."

Now that they were sitting so close together, it seemed to Lizzy that Jane looked kind of tired around the eyes. She'd never really seen her like that before.

"Really? What's going on, Jane? Are the boys OK?"

"Well...I'm not sure. Maybe not. Did you notice how quiet Aiden has gotten lately?" Jane said this in her professional psychologist voice.

"I guess, yeah."

"In the last few months he's more or less stopped expressing himself verbally, and, as you saw, he's started having these huge temper tantrums."

Lizzy nodded for her to go on.

"I had some concerns about this, and so a couple of weeks ago I took him to be evaluated by a psychologist. And—well, and it looks like he may be somewhere on the autism spectrum." She bit her lip and tears welled in her eyes as reached up to stroke Emma's cheek.

"Oh, Jane." Lizzy reached out her hand to hold her sister's. "I don't even know where to start. How are you? Are you holding up?"

Jane sniffed a little. "I'm so worried for him. I want him to have a normal life, and grow up and get married and all that, and I don't know if that will happen for him. If it can. We just don't know yet."

"Oh, sweetie." Lizzy put her arms around Jane and held her, as together they rocked Emma. "I'm so sorry."

"I keep wondering if it was something I did. Was it pesticides in his food? Vaccines?" Lizzy scoffed openly at that one. "I know, that's junk science. But, I mean, is it my DNA? Did I do something wrong? Did I not do something I should have done? _What _did I do wrong? I've tried so hard to do everything right, and look what happened anyway."

Lizzy reached over to the side table to get a tissue for Jane, who was openly weeping by this time. Jane dabbed at her eyes with it.

"Janey, you didn't do anything wrong. There are so, so many things in life we can't control. I think, well, you and I, we both try and try to bend everything to our will, make things turn out the way we want. And sometimes we succeed. But I—well, if the last five months have taught me anything, it's that, especially as a parent, you, _I_...How can I say this? It's an illusion. The control is an illusion."

A lot of things about Jane's behavior in the last couple of years were starting to make more sense to Lizzy all of a sudden. The bossiness, the fixations on safety, the mania for organics and toxin-free things, the intense efforts to make everything_ just perfect_: they were all her ways of grabbing for control where she didn't really have any, ways to try and head off Aiden's emerging symptoms. Ultimately, _nobody _had control over how their children turned out in a lot of ways, no matter how hard they tried. Lizzy wondered how much control over her life Jane actually had outside of these four walls, too. What was Charlie's role in all this? Oh, dear.

"I know you're right," sniffled Jane. "I'm a psychologist, after all. It's just really hard to accept."

They talked for awhile about Aiden, Jane's plans for him, and whether it would be best to get him into a preschool where he could get some support and therapy, or to continue to stay home. Jane wasn't sure, and she thought she and Charlie needed to talk to the psychologist more about it before they decided.

Finally, Emma started fussing and grabbing for Lizzy, so Jane handed her back over. She stood up, wiped off her cheeks, and straightened her clothing.

"Well! Enough of my little pity party. I'd better get things ready for when the boys wake up."

She bustled around cleaning things up, setting up the educational activities she would do with the boys until dinner time. Lizzy took the opportunity to make them both a cup of tea, which was a bit of a challenge with Emma on her hip. She also took the opportunity to observe Jane. She looked so damn serene and happy on the surface, but Lizzy wasn't fooled anymore.

Later, Charlie came home for dinner. He tossed Aiden high in the air, chucked Tyler under the chin, and kissed Jane's cheek. They made it all look so easy. It was kind of scary, considering what Lizzy now knew was roiling around underneath.

That evening, Elena called to say that her mother had died earlier that day, complications from the stroke.

"Oh, Elena, I'm so sorry. From what you told me, she was a wonderful woman, so devoted to your family. Will and I will be happy to do anything, anything you need to help you and your family."

"Thank you, Lizzy. I think right now the main thing is I need some time, to plan the funeral, and get everyone back here. Maybe a week."

"Of course. Let's say for sure that you don't need to be back here next week. If you need another week, or more, just say the word."

"I...that's too generous, Lizzy. I need to get back to work."

"Is it the money? You get paid bereavement leave. It's in the contract."

They wrangled about it for a little while longer until they finally agreed that Elena would take all of the following week off, too, to arrange her mother's affairs.

* * *

After another rough night in Jane's English country garden guest room, Lizzy and Emma both woke up cranky at 6 o'clock. Lizzy looked in Emma's mouth and, _voila_!, another new tooth. That explained a lot.

Charlie and Jane got up around 7, and Charlie kissed Jane's cheek and headed for the train at about 7:30. While Tyler and Aiden slept until 8 o'clock, Jane hummed and tripped around the house and baked scones for her friends who were going to be coming to visit that day. They were fellow developmental psychologists, old grad school classmates visiting New York for the big psychology conference. They had flown from Europe to New York a day early so they could drive out to Westchester to spend the day with Jane.

At around 11, after Emma and Lizzy had finally gotten up from what was supposed to be a nap but ended up being more of a fussy wrestling match, Véronique and Claudia arrived. Véronique was all sleek Parisian chic, and Claudia was more the Earth Mother type. After loads of exclaiming and cheek-kissing all around, they settled in the breakfast nook with the scones and a pot of tea.

The old friends caught up on work and kids and partners for a while, as Lizzy struggled to stay awake. Eventually the conversation turned to Lizzy's situation. Jane explained that Lizzy had just left her job, and alluded to the fact that it hadn't been entirely voluntary.

"Yup. Well, you know, it's an important time for us to be together, too, so..." said Lizzy, vaguely, temporarily forgetting that she was in the presence of people who thought about this stuff for a living.

Véronique nodded and said, "Well, as you know, in France we believe that it is not in the best interest of the child, developmentally, to be confined to the home alone with the mother for long periods of time. The child suffers from insufficient mental stimulation, and a lack of opportunities for social interaction, preventing him or her from being properly socialized from an early age."

At this, Lizzy awoke from her stupor a bit and inquired, "So are women encouraged to go back to work soon after giving birth?"

"Well, yes...they receive six weeks of maternity leave before the birth, and then ten weeks afterward. But if they wish, mother and father may both share as much as three years of parental leave before returning to their jobs."

"Paid?"

"Yes, of course. It is part of a social insurance scheme."

"What about day care?"

"From age two months, there are the subsidized childcare centers or...how do you say it here?... family day cares, and from age two years or so there are the _écoles maternelles_, the public preschools. How else can a child learn the proper social and linguistic skills?"

Claudia laughed. "You know, Germans think it is the other way around entirely."

"What do you mean?" asked Lizzy.

"Most Germans believe that it stunts a child's emotional development and creates an unstable psyche if the child is forced to be separated from her mother and put in the company of strangers."

Véronique snorted. "Ridiculous."

"Now, I did _not _say that I agreed with this."

Lizzy had the feeling that this discussion had been going on for many years.

"Yes, yes..."

"But we do have a social insurance scheme, as in France. Mothers receive paid leave for 6 weeks before the baby is born, and are not allowed to come back to work until 8 weeks _after _the baby is born. After this, we also have three years of paid parental leave, which both the mother and the father can share. But almost no fathers use it. It interferes with their careers, and people believe it shows they are not serious about their work."

"So, do most moms stay home with their children, then, until they start school?" Lizzy wanted to know.

"Yes, of course. And it is very difficult for many mothers to return to work even when their children are in school, because the school day is very short and there are long holidays. Also, the shops are all closed on evenings and weekends."

"Did you stay home with your child?"

Claudia shook her head. "Not entirely. I worked part-time while my son was young. I felt terribly guilty putting him in day care, with my mother and sister shouting at me about how I was a _rabenmutter_, a ravenmother, so irresponsible she pushes her children out of the nest right after they are born. _Kinder, Küche, Kirche_, you know. Fortunately, my mother-in-law supported me. She grew up in the DDR, East Germany, in the days of state socialism. All the women worked then, of course. They had to. She told me a lot of stories about the 'good old days,' when there was a year of maternity leave, and so on. They had up to 40 days a year of paid days off to care for a sick child, can you believe it? And one paid day off every month to do housework!" She roared with laughter. "Too bad they didn't give that to the men! But I suppose the authorities had to do all of this if they wanted women to work."

Jane and Lizzy looked at each other.

Jane said, "Hmm, as I think you know, all of this is really different from here in the States."

Lizzy said, "It's like we've got the worst of both worlds: most of us have to work, but we don't have the things to make it possible. All the guilt and none of the support."

Véronique asked Lizzy, "So, they are not holding your job for you?"

"No, no, they don't do that for you here. That ship has sailed," Lizzy said brightly.

"If you want to go back to work, don't stay away too long," counselled Claudia. "The studies show that ten months of leave is the optimal time for mother and baby. Shorter isn't good for mother or baby, and longer than that and the mother's skills start to become outmoded."

"Hmm. Good to know," said Lizzy thoughtfully.

* * *

Jane asked Lizzy to stay over on Wednesday night so they would have time to talk some more after Claudia and Véronique had gone back to the city.

Around 5 o'clock, Will called and they talked on FaceTime. Lizzy excitedly showed him Emma's new, second tooth, just poking out of her gum on the bottom.

"Sweetheart," he said, "I know you told me that you were doing OK and you didn't need me to come back early, but I'm thinking I'll cut things short and come home tomorrow."

"You don't need to do that on our account. We're doing fine at Jane's. Please don't worry about us."

"I think I'm just going to skip the last leg of the trip. I'm going to leave it to Carmen and Greg." They were the two VPs who had traveled with him.

"Of course we'd love it if you came back, but, truly, there's no need to put it all on them if you want to finish things up there. I know you like to be there for important negotiations."

"Well, honestly...I just miss you and Emma, and I want to go home to see you."

Lizzy's eyebrows shot up in surprise before she quickly composed herself and acted as if it had never happened. "That would be great. Fantastic. Once you have it, tell me your flight info, OK?"

That evening, Lizzy and Jane talked for a couple of hours after the boys had gone to bed about five seconds after dinner. Emma still had a good three and a half hours of full-on awakeness left in her.

"There's just so much to think about," said Jane. "I want to understand more about autism so I know what to do, how to help Aiden."

"What do you mean? Are you thinking of going back to school?"

"I know, you'd think I'd have had enough of that by now. But, maybe. Maybe. There's a program to train special education teachers at SUNY Westchester. I could do that." It was just like Jane, Lizzy realized, to approach an issue in this way: to learn all she could about it, master it, figure out how to solve it. And it seemed to work for her, so who could argue with that?

The next morning, Lizzy called to cancel the babysitter, and then she and Emma raced back to the city after the morning rush hour to dump off all their stuff. Emma nursed, Lizzy ate, and then they took the car service out to JFK to surprise Will at the Lufthansa baggage claim.

When Emma spotted him as he emerged from the secure area, she squawked and moved her extended arms and legs as if she were doing jumping jacks in her baby carrier. Will looked tired as he slumped out the door with his garment bag over his shoulder, searching for a driver from the car service. He zeroed in on the driver and moved in that direction before he noticed Lizzy and Emma standing nearby. He straightened up, his eyes brightened, and he quickly strode toward them.

Will covered Emma's face with butterfly kisses before he took Lizzy in his arms, the baby sandwiched between them. He kissed her for ever so slightly too long to be entirely appropriate in public, at least by his standards. Wow, thought Lizzy, he _never _did that.

"Welcome home," she said with a broad smile, backing off a little to let Emma breathe more freely, but leaving her hands on his waist.

"You don't know how glad I am to see you," he replied, grinning back at her with total abandon.

"I think I have some idea. We missed you, too. Every second," she whispered. And it was true. Everything was better now that he was back with them.

* * *

_What, no footnotes?_

* * *

_If you feel so inclined, please do leave me a precious little comment below._


	13. Chapter 13

_A/N: Thanks as always to Jan, Barbara, and Alison._

* * *

**Chapter 13**

**March 2013**

As the end of March neared, Emma was now "sleeping through the night," meaning a little under five hours at a stretch, about three nights a week. She would also usually grudgingly sleep for an hour at a time twice during the day when Lizzy put her down in her crib. It was a miracle. Lizzy could practically feel her synapses begin to re-connect as her brain gradually woke up from the deep freeze it had been in for so many months.

As Lizzy emerged from her fog, she started avidly reading the newspaper, legal blogs, and even law review articles. It was an exciting time for a legal junkie. How was the Supreme Court going to rule on same-sex marriage? What was going to happen with the Voting Rights Act? With affirmative action? These were landmark civil rights and political cases, things she cared a lot about. She also caught up on, and started following very closely, the hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, and other issues related to the detention of prisoners there, things she'd worked on at HRI.

She wished she had someone to talk to about all of this. She tried explaining it all to Emma, but all she ever said in reply was "bbblllllph." She emailed her friends, but they were busy at work and couldn't reply right away. So she started reading and commenting on a blog she'd followed avidly before Emma was born. It was about "lawfare," how national security law could be used as a weapon of war. That definitely connected up with all the Guantánamo issues.

It wasn't much, but it was OK for now. Spring was finally getting ready to show its face. All those months of being confined to indoor activities would at last come to an end. The zoo, the aquarium, the beach...they were all waiting to be enjoyed! Life was good.

* * *

Will, unfortunately, wasn't faring as well, particularly when it came to dealing with Georgie. He reported to Lizzy that the family therapy was going OK, although he didn't share a lot of the details with her. Finally, nearly six weeks after Georgie had been admitted to Tranquility, she and the counselors asked Will if he would consider bringing Lizzy and Emma to one of the sessions. It was part of repairing the family, re-building the foundation of trust that had been lost over the years. He and Lizzy talked about it for a long time before they both finally agreed it was probably the right thing to do. The following Saturday, they all drove up to Tranquility. Naturally Emma screamed the whole way there, with Lizzy in the back seat trying to calm her. They managed to get her put back together just before the counseling session started.

The three of them walked together into the therapy room, a cozy, cheerful space decorated all in soothing, dusky pinks. It looked liked someone's living room, although Lizzy noticed that all the furniture and lamps were bolted down so that nobody could throw them.

Perched lightly on the edge of the central sofa seat was Georgie. She wasn't at all like the picture Lizzy had unconsciously had in her head of what a drug addict looked like. She was tall, very slender, ethereal, like some kind of unexpectedly beautiful cross between a baby giraffe and a shimmering fairy. She had big, soft clear eyes with long lashes, and wavy, romantically long dark hair with expertly executed highlights in it, understated designer clothes, no jewelry except for an engagement ring with a single giant diamond, and manicured nails. Lizzy realized that, based on a few overheard conversations, she had assumed Georgie would be a screaming harridan with a rat's nest in her hair and her arms covered in track marks. But she wasn't. In fact, she looked exactly like Will's sister _should _look: composed, striking, exquisitely mannered, rich. Lizzy really hoped her own surprise didn't show too much as she followed a grim Will, who was holding Emma, toward Georgie.

Georgie stood up and smiled a tentative smile. She was nearly as tall as Will. They kissed each other on the cheek and murmured words that Lizzy couldn't quite make out. Will introduced Emma to Georgie, and Georgie smiled and touched Emma's hand and said all the socially appropriate things one says to an infant. Lizzy could see Will's eyes moving back and forth between the two of them in what looked to be some kind of painful comparison. She hoped he saw what he wanted to see, and conversely found no trace of what he didn't want to see.

Lizzy stepped forward to hold out her hand and say, "Hi, Georgie, I'm Lizzy."

Georgie smiled and took her hand warmly. "I'm so glad you could come. Thank you," she murmured graciously, as though it were a cocktail party.

The counselor, a man in his mid-50s named John, came in and made sure everyone had settled in before he reminded them that the subject of discussion today was trust, how people could earn and lose trust, and how, specifically, their family could learn to trust each other enough again that they could move forward through Georgie's recovery.

Lizzy mostly just observed, although she did speak a few times when John directly asked her questions.

"What do you think, Lizzy? Can you accept Georgie back into the family with open arms?" John asked at one point.

"Look, I have no preconceptions here," Lizzy answered. "I feel like I've walked into the middle of a conversation, and I don't know what's already been said. My only concern is to keep Will from being hurt again."

In Will, she saw distress, sadness, fear and anger, all held firmly in check. She couldn't read Georgie, of course. Georgie was contrite, she apologized, she said she wanted so much to do better. But there was in her manner some kind of an edge that raised Lizzy's hackles.

John had them talk a lot about what Georgie could do to earn Will's trust back, conditions that had to be met and so on before she would get the things that she wanted from him. Once Georgie tried to steer the conversation toward how _she _might regain trust in _Will_, since he had failed to come through for her so many times in her hour of need. How could she know for sure that he wouldn't walk away from her recovery process? But John told her that was not appropriate. She, and her addiction, had forced him to apply limits, John said, and that wasn't the same thing at all as the many times she had stolen or lied or manipulated.

It went round and round like this for a couple of hours, and Lizzy wasn't exactly sure what they had accomplished at the end of the session. But John seemed satisfied, and he asked Georgie if she would like to invite anyone else for the session the following week. She said she would: her fiancé, Blake.

Lizzy heard Will groan quietly at the mention of his name, but he agreed all the same.

They hung around chatting uncomfortably with Georgie about innocuous, socially acceptable topics for a while after the session ended. Then Georgie had another appointment, so Lizzy and Will left to go get dinner before hitting the road. Lizzy didn't push him to talk about what had just happened. Then they couldn't talk in the car because of Emma's howling, and it had to wait until they were back home.

"So, what did you think of that?" Will asked as they all crashed together on the sofa in the entertainment room.

She cleared her throat. "Well, um. Ahem. How about if you start?"

He shook his head and turned to lie down with his feet up on her lap. "You first." He sat Emma on his chest.

"She's clearly very bright, um, and articulate, together. Not what I expected, I guess."

"Yup. Right. That's why I couldn't believe it for so long. Believe that she was an addict, I mean."

Lizzy thought about this for a while. "Do you think she's serious about getting well? Honestly, I couldn't tell. That whole thing about _your _not being trustworthy just blew my mind."

"Yeah. I think she's struggling with how much responsibility she needs to accept for the things she's done. I guess you heard, she's still sometimes thinking of herself as the only victim in all this. I'm not sure John is the one, the counselor, who can make her see it's more complicated than that. Or maybe it's that she's not ready to see yet, no matter who is running the show."

"And if she's not ready, it's not going to work, is it? The rehab?" Lizzy rubbed Emma's back where she sat on Will's lap.

Will shook his head. "No, it won't. I think Blake is the wildcard here, though. Do you remember I told you they met in the Hamptons? He was hospitalized for a long time here in the city after his last OD, and then his family sent him to Colorado for rehab, I guess to get him away from all his friends here. A luxury place up in the mountains, something like that. He just got out, and came back to New York. I met him, and, um, he talks a big game about turning his life around. The way he tells it, he hit rock bottom and he's looking for a way out. She seems really attached to him. I think the question is whether he's going to pull her up, or she's going to pull him down. Or, maybe, whether they'll pull each other down."

"Hmm, sort of like, _can she change for love_?"

"Right. People can't do that, in my experience," he said, tickling Emma's foot. Emma laughed but Will's expression was glum.

Lizzy shot him a look that said, _really_?

He gave her a half-hearted, lopsided smile back. "OK, but only if they're ready to change, anyway."

"What's Blake like? I mean, why the negative reaction when John asked if he could come to therapy?"

"He's a Leland, you know, turn-of-the-century steel money. Not stupid. Failed out of...Bowdoin, maybe? Because of drugs. He just has this, I don't know, this _manner _that feels kind of, um...sociopathic, is I guess what I'd call it."

"Aha, a 100% boundary-free individual, eh?" Lizzy joked. But she realized that that kind of feeling was probably what had set her off about Georgie, too.

Will chuckled in agreement, which was probably about as close to a laugh as he was going to get today.

He went on, "I know she's manipulative, and I get the feeling he is, too. I don't know what she wants. Is she running some kind of con? I can't figure out what it is, if so. In six years, when she's 35, she gets full control of the last part of her trust fund. There's nothing we can do to make that happen faster."

Lizzy was shocked by this. "You mean her money is in trust till she turns 35? She has no control of her money till she's 35? And you got yours right away. That's incredible. How infantilizing."

"Yeah, I know. It's the terms of the family trust from my great-grandparents, different rules for girls and boys. I'm the executor because I'm the oldest male child."

Lizzy grimaced at that. Damn nineteenth-century sexism extending its cold, dead hand from the grave. She wondered if they'd be able to change the terms of the trust for Emma.

She asked, "But Blake still has access to _his _family money, right? That's why the big rock on her finger, and the fancy clothes and stuff?"

"Yeah, I guess. I know she sold all the family jewelry she had, and all her other nice things, for drugs a long time ago. Probably that's why she's asking for more money from the family trust."

Lizzy thought about this for a while. "Well...what if actually everything is exactly as it seems, and there's nothing bigger going on here?" she asked.

"Right. That's exactly the problem, why we were talking about trust today. She's lied so many times that I don't know if I could believe this was all legit even if it totally and completely was."

Lizzy stroked his leg. She didn't know what to say, so she didn't say anything.

Will held Emma up in front of his face so he could gaze into her eyes. "Georgie looked so much like Emma when she was little." Lizzy had seen photos of Georgie, and actually she thought they didn't look much alike except insofar as they were both human babies, but she kept her mouth shut. "So much wasted promise. How do we keep Emma from turning out like that?"

Oh, so that's what some of this was about. Poor Will.

A catch in her voice, she said, "Sweetheart, Emma is not Georgie, OK? We're already doing things really differently from how your parents did them. We're going to be there for her. We already are. We're going to do everything we know how to do to make her happy and healthy, and then we're going to hope for the best. That's all we _can _do."

"You're right, I know."

They sat in silence for a while longer. Suddenly, Will said, "I just screwed things up so badly with Georgie, and I don't want to do the same thing with Emma."

In shock, Lizzy blurted, "What?! Do _not _let her get into your head like that. All of this is _not _your fault. She kept right on making bad choices for a long, long time after she was already an adult."

He looked doubtful. She wasn't having any of it.

"Really, you have to stop doing that, blaming yourself. You are a _good _father. You have been a _good _brother. You have always tried to do your best by her. You have to let it go. It's like you said, _she _has to take responsibility for her behavior, _she _has to make amends, not you." She paused and looked at him. He looked so, so sad.

Her voice full of empathy, she continued, "If this is too much for you, if it's too hard, you don't have to go to the therapy sessions anymore. You can let the lawyers handle everything, let them do what they're required to legally. You can walk away, if that's what you need to do for your own mental health."

"I know." He kissed Emma's hair. "But she's my sister." And that was, of course, the heart of the matter.

So he kept going to the sessions, driving to Connecticut every Saturday, watching in perplexity as events there unfolded.

* * *

Later that week, at one of her Wednesday mothers' group meetings at the community center, Lizzy ran unexpectedly into an old friend. It was Stacy, who several years before had been a member of the women lawyers support group—until she had had a baby, stopped coming to the group, and then dropped out of the law altogether. Now she had a toddler and an infant. She and Lizzy hadn't seen each other for a couple of years now.

"I don't know what I was thinking," said Stacy, sitting down on the rubber play mat on the floor next to her toddler daughter, who was playing with blocks. "I should have had a nanny from the start instead of trying daycare. The firm said it was family-friendly, though, so I thought maybe it would work out. Big mistake. And when I found out I was pregnant again, and Jim started traveling three weeks a month for work...Well, I just couldn't take it anymore, so I quit." She shifted her baby boy to her other arm.

"Yeah, I can understand that," said Lizzy, sitting down next to her and helping Emma sit up on the mat. "And you were working a _lot _of hours."

"It just wasn't doable."

"Are you thinking of going back at some point? Or are you happy with things as they are now?" Lizzy handed Emma a plastic block to see if she would do anything with it besides chew on it.

"I don't know. It sure doesn't seem feasible to go back with the little one here. And, maybe we'll have another, who knows. Anyway, I'm just not sure we could try to juggle a second career while Jim is traveling so much."

"What exactly is he doing now?" Lizzy asked.

"Still management consulting." She named the firm her husband worked for, one of the biggest consulting firms in the country. "He's mostly doing stuff in the healthcare sector, and there's lots to do gearing up for the Affordable Care Act, all over the country. They have these months-long projects and sometimes he doesn't even get home on weekends if the site is too far away."

"Wow, that's rough. How do you get by?"

"A part-time nanny, and my mom lives in Greenwich, so we go stay with her a lot. There are some other moms in our building and we help each other out." Lizzy thought that must be nice, to have nearby family who weren't nutcases and other moms in the building. Of course she was just assuming that Stacy's mother wasn't a nutcase.

"Actually," said Stacy, "you might like those moms and some other ones that we get together with. They're all Ivy League grads, and, you know, MBAs and JDs. Maybe you'd like to meet up with us? We have a standing playdate at Martha's on Tuesday mornings." Martha's was a café on the Upper West Side specializing in brunch and known for being child-friendly. That meant it had organic peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches on organic whole wheat bread and a play area for young kids, and eggs benedict and mimosas for the parents.

"Yeah, sure. That sounds great," said Lizzy. She liked Stacy. Maybe she could learn a thing or two from those other moms, too, moms who were all in the same boat as her.

* * *

The next week, Lizzy and Emma made their way into Martha's café and quickly found Stacy and the five other women in her group. Their toddlers were playing in the play area, and three infants were in their strollers and carseats next to the moms. Only Lizzy held her baby in a carrier on her chest. Stacy did the introductions and offered to order her a drink.

"Do you want a mimosa? Kate and Megan aren't nursing anymore so they're partaking."

"Thanks, I can't, nursing," said Lizzy, not that she would have had a mimosa at 10 o'clock on a Tuesday morning anyway. "So, Stacy says you're all refugees from law and business, like me?"

Megan, a redhead with her hair in a professional-looking bun and fancy French nails, raised her mimosa glass in salute and said, "You bet! Met my husband at HBS. Left Portman & Caldwell when my second was born." HBS was Harvard Business School, and Portman & Caldwell was a big marketing firm.

Kate chimed in, "Stanford Law," and the others mentioned Wharton, Kellogg, and Sloan, the top business and law schools in the country. Stacy's degree was from Harvard Law School, Lizzy knew. They were all upfront about the fact that none of them had any plans to go back to work, ever. Their husbands' jobs took them away from home too much, they said, or it was too hard to coordinate their working lives, or they didn't like being away from their children as much as they had to in the jobs they had been trained to do. And, money was no object.

Megan turned and froze Lizzy with a sharp, penetrating look. "So, where do you have her on the list for preschool?"

"Um, the one at Renwick Academy." Getting Emma on the list was one of the first things she and Will had done once they'd entered the second trimester of pregnancy.

"Oh, really? That place is really old school, I hear. Do you know for sure she'll get in? My older daughter is at The Abbey School. That's the really hot place nowadays. We were lucky to get her in there, since she started out on the waiting list even though we applied when I was ten weeks pregnant, can you believe it? My husband went to Princeton with the admissions director," she confided in a lower voice, "otherwise there was no chance of her getting in. But, they give preference to siblings, so that means Olivia, here," she nodded toward her daughter in the play area, "is in, too."

The other women mentioned the very exclusive preschools that their children were in or would be starting soon. Kate said she and her husband had sent in her son's application for preschool even before he was conceived, otherwise he would never have gotten into the very elite program where he would start the next year.

"Wow, I had no idea it was so competitive," said Lizzy. Of course she knew about the difficulties of getting into selective _colleges_, but this stuff about elementary school and preschool was beyond her. She'd never even heard of any of these places before. How the hell had she ever managed to get into Columbia, coming out of the Artemis public school system?

"Oh, yeah," said Stacy. "If you want your kid to have a shot at a good prep school, and then a top boarding school, you have to start out at one of these preschools. Otherwise, you can just kiss Harvard or Yale goodbye. Even being a legacy isn't a total lock there anymore, you know."

Lizzy supposed that that was because they occasionally let in rabble like herself now. Still, if this was what it took for kids from Will's, and now her, socioeconomic background to get into a top college, then maybe she'd better start paying attention to all this stuff. "Hmm. I guess we, Will and I, never really talked about that too much because he had his heart set on Renwick. He and his sister went there."

"Oh, right," said Stacy. "So I guess Emma's in for sure."

Megan looked at her inquiringly.

"Her husband is Will Darcy, you know, one of the Fitzwilliam cousins. They all go to Renwick."

The women all nodded and murmured, "Right, right." How did they know that? wondered Lizzy.

One of the MBAs, Sharon, started talking about her older child, who was in third grade at a very posh elementary school on the Upper East Side with a lot of politicians' and celebrities' kids. "I'm really worried about him," Sharon said. "He's a very good student. He gets excellent grades. But I'm not sure if he's doing enough extracurriculars. The kind of portfolio he has right now is just not going to get him into an elite high school."

Lizzy thought, extracurriculars for a third grader? What is that? Mudpie-making or something? A _portfolio_?

Kate nodded her head sympathetically. "I know. Being well-rounded is so important to the admissions officers these days. He does tae kwon do, right? And he plays the violin, and volunteers with you at the soup kitchen? That's all good."

"You'd think so, right?" Sharon threw her hands up in the air in exasperation. "But the educational consultant at our school said at a meeting we had last week that the kids also need to make some kind of important contribution, you know, start their own NGO for needy children in the Third World, or maybe found their own socially conscious Internet business or something. Something big that really sets them apart from the other kids, gets attention in the admissions office."

"Yeah, that's true," said Megan. "Maybe you can sit down with him and talk about his interests, find a niche of some kind, and then work up a business plan. If you're too busy with the little one, I could set you up with a friend of mine who does some freelancing in business development with child entrepreneurs. She started with her own son, you know, for a school project, and then started selling her services. She's great."

"Thanks, yeah, if you could text me her info," Sharon replied.

Lizzy listened in horrified fascination.

That evening as Lizzy and Will hung out in the living room playing with Emma on the carpet, she told him about the playdate, which had lasted for about four very, very intense hours.

"You should have seen it. The entire time, they were strategizing about how they were going to get their kids into Harvard, and turn them into these successful clones of themselves, top-notch professionals and people who are going to contribute to the world in these super meaningful ways. I mean, the table was practically pulsating with brain power, right? And they're focusing this laser beam of intellect and ambition and drive and cutting analysis right there on their children. I half expected one of the kids to just, _poof_, go up in smoke."

"Well, that's what they know how to do, right? Make a plan and carry it out successfully." Will lay on his back and held Emma up over his chest, in Supergirl flying position. She obliged by drooling on his shirt.

Lizzy reached for a tissue from the side table and wiped off the drool. "Yeah, only the plan isn't a marketing strategy, or business development, or a legal case, it's the kid. They're, like, _controlling _every aspect of these kids' lives. Honestly, it really kind of freaked me out."

"Why's that? You know a lot of women who are driven like that, don't you?" He hoisted Emma up and down like he was lifting weights. She laughed and giggled.

"Because—" Lizzy hesitated, tissue in hand. "One, because shouldn't the kids have _some _freedom of choice? Not have their every move choreographed by mom? Have their own ambitions and plans? And two, because—" She stopped again.

"What?" Now Will sat up and held Emma in his lap.

Lizzy shoved the tissue into her pocket, looked down at the white carpet and picked at it with her fingers. "Because I can imagine myself doing exactly the same thing if I don't have some other kind of _project _to channel my energy and ambition into," she said in a small voice.

Will leaned back a little, a wry smile creeping over his face. "Aha. Aha. Now we're onto something, I think."

"Yeah, go ahead and laugh. You know it's true. Women have been trying to achieve things through their children forever, when there wasn't any way to pursue them directly. But it's like...these women have all the tools, all the degrees, all the opportunity to do it on their own behalf, and they're not doing it. It's back on their kids, again, like in the bad old days."

"But from what you said before, you could understand why they left their careers, right? It was just too hard to manage two careers."

"Yes, I do understand. I'm doing the same thing, right? But at the same time, it's like we're all acting out those old questions about whether it's worth it to educate women. Like, _why educate them at all when they're just going to quit and have babies?_" she asked in a growly old man voice. "_It's just a waste of human capital_. It's like we're setting out to show that Rousseau was right, the only significant thing a woman can do with her education is to raise the next generation of men to be good citizens and leaders. Only these women—_we_—are raising our daughters to do it, too, or maybe to get the education and then 'retire,' too. It's so frustrating!"

"Well, I don't know about what Rousseau said. I've definitely heard the human capital argument, of course, as a way to justify not hiring women. I don't buy it, of course. But anyway, if this works for them, if it's what they want to do, isn't that OK? Isn't that what you want, for women to do what they want to do?"

"Yes, of course," sighed Lizzy, her frustration subsiding. She scooted back and slumped a little against the front of the sofa. "And raising children is incredibly important. Obviously I think that, or I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing."

"Yeah, clearly."

Lizzy drew spirals in the carpet for a few moments before she looked up at Will and Emma.

"I don't want to be like them, and it would be so, so easy for me to be like that with Emma. I could feel myself getting sucked in a little today. I think it would make both of us crazy. And a crazy mom is a bad mom."

"I'm sure you could figure out, you know, how to give her a longer leash or whatever." Will put Emma on her belly on the floor and watched her inch herself forward as if she were swimming. "See, she's striking out on her own here pretty well already."

"I don't know. I need to think about this. Whether I can really shut off the ambition. That's one of my limitations as a person."

Will looked at her sharply and asked, "Who said you have to shut it off? Things don't have to be like this forever. You don't have to stay home forever. Nobody ever said that."

"True, true. Oh, jeez, did you hear that? Ugh, again. Let's get her changed and into the bath."

* * *

As the days passed and she felt increasingly more alert, Lizzy started to miss aspects of her old life more and more. She wouldn't give up the time she'd had with Emma for anything, and in fact she was greedy for more of it. But the part of her brain that had been overwhelmed by lack of sleep and mothering instincts was starting to reassert itself, to want some attention. Lizzy realized she was starting to get the itch again, the itch to get back to the law. But what could she do?

Emma was still so little. There was no way Lizzy was going back to a position like the one she'd had at HRI, with all those hours and all that travel, those court dates she couldn't miss or the whole case would go to hell. Or, God forbid, the corporate law position she'd had at DeWitt back in the day. The part-time legal work she'd heard of was something like a small firm doing family and estate law. That wasn't the direction she wanted to go. In-house corporate counsel? Maybe, but it wouldn't get her back on the same track she'd been on. Maybe part-time at a legal defense fund of some kind? She'd think about that. How could she do the kind of work she loved, with hours she could withstand, and still keep doors open for the future if she wanted to go back to a more demanding career? Was it even possible? She needed some advice if she wanted to get serious about this.

She sent out messages to her network of Yale classmates and former SCOTUS clerks, and called up her law school mentor, Professor Leah Hoffman. Prof. Hoffman didn't have kids of her own, but Lizzy knew that she understood the dilemmas of parenthood. She also kept in good touch with her former students and had a good idea of what was going on in the profession as a result.

Lizzy eventually got through to her, and promised not to take too much time from her busy schedule. She explained the circumstances of her departure from HRI, and said she was trying to figure out where she could go from here.

"Yeah, I know, it's tough," said Prof. Hoffman. "If you're thinking of getting back into it, it's good you're not waiting too long. The longer you're out, the harder it is to get back on the elite track that a superstar like you belongs on."

Lizzy was a little flustered by the compliment. "Oh, well, right, I hear it's hard to get back in, yes. But, back in what capacity is what I'm wondering."

"You're right, it's an unforgiving profession. And I think we're going to keep on hemorrhaging women until some things change."

"So, from your vantage point, where you see what women, mothers, are doing in the law, how—I mean, are there any options that are relatively flexible, but don't disqualify you from advancement? You know, in public service, for instance?"

Prof. Hoffman sighed. "Not much, I'm afraid. Corporate is out. High-profile _anything _is really out. One thing that maybe you could consider—and I don't know if this appeals at all—is academia."

"Yeah, President Obama taught at Chicago, right? Before he went into politics. Proof it doesn't disqualify you for advancement, I guess!"

"Well, if you're interested, you have some time to get ready for the fall hiring season. It's cyclical—recruitment for tenure-track positions is in September and October for positions beginning the following academic year. Your résumé would need to go out in early August."

"What would I need to be an attractive candidate?"

"With your qualifications and experience, I think publishing a couple of law review articles should do it."

"Hmm. I co-wrote one with a colleague while I was at HRI. So, another, maybe?"

"Yes. Aim high, and think big. I know you always do."

Lizzy did more research and thought about it for a couple of days. She'd never seriously considered teaching before, even though she'd guest lectured a couple of times at NYU. But the more she thought about it the more appealing it seemed. She had loved law school, the arguments and questioning and big concepts. How great would it be if she could communicate all that to up-and-coming new lawyers? She also had really enjoyed the time she had spent working on the law review article, and the thought of continuing to devote some of her time to that was very attractive. It was a tough and uncertain job market, though, and she had reservations about committing herself to anything just yet.

Finally she brought it up with Will. One evening they talked about it from the time he got home to the time they went to bed. Could they make it work? What would have to change to make it feasible? Would she be ready to leave Emma more often in a year and a half? What would Emma be like, and what would she need, so far in the future? Could they even imagine what such a new life might be like? In the end, they decided that the best thing to do might be for her to start down that path—begin working on a law review article—and see how it felt in the fall when the recruitment season was upon them.

A couple of days later, Will came home with a new laptop for her. He had asked Ahmed to have it all set up with subscriptions to Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg Law—all the databases she would need to get access to the latest legal thinking for her research. What a sweet man.

And so Lizzy changed how she used her afternoons off from Emma duty. Rather than always exercising in the home gym, or reading a novel, or taking a nap, which she needed less and less anyway, she started researching and writing the article. While she'd been working at HRI on the Guantánamo cases, she'd thought she'd found a novel way to attack the state secrets doctrine that kept so many of the government's programs and legal rationales, the ones that impinged on human rights most severely, hidden. But she'd never had a chance to think it through completely before she had quit. So now she started working on it in earnest.

The authors on the lawfare blog liked some of her comments, and saw where she was heading with her arguments. They invited her to start contributing to the site. She started writing blog posts that helped her think through her ideas with the help of the sharp minds she encountered there.

It was really weird to spend the afternoon in her home office thinking and writing about horrible things like torture and extradition to third countries for the purposes of carrying it out, or pondering legal minutiae about state secrets, and then to emerge, blinking, into the bright, happy living room where Emma and Elena awaited her. But it was also a great relief. And sometimes, she realized, so was walking back into her office to sit down for a good think.

* * *

The last week in March, Ahmed started his parental leave. He and Phil flew to Los Angeles, where they were in the delivery room while their daughter, Ava, was born. He sent his friends and co-workers an email, with a photo, sharing the joyful news. It was a beautiful image of Ava, him, Phil, and Ava's birth mother, with whom they had arranged an open adoption. She had told them she was, of course, sadder than sad to say goodbye to Ava, but she was also hopeful that with them, Ava would have a loving, happy home, something she herself couldn't provide.

In Ahmed's absence, Will had hired a temp, an experienced, competent, professional, well-qualified woman in her 40s, to fill in as his PA. At first he groused about having to do it. It wasn't a totally seamless transition, and a few things weren't done to his total satisfaction. But he eventually got over it. Nobody could compare to Ahmed, it seemed. Will thought Lizzy hadn't noticed that he had started a countdown, marking the weeks till Ahmed returned, on the blotter of his desk in his home office. But she knew it was there.

* * *

On a Sunday morning in early April, Will and Lizzy were sitting at the table in the breakfast nook eating bagels and lox and reading the newspaper, and Emma was sitting in her highchair banging some plastic cups around.

"Oh, God," cried Lizzy, slamming down the Styles section. "Another stupid article on a stupid study about whether kids are better off if their mothers stay home to take care of them or if their mothers have paid jobs. Enough 'mommy wars' crap already! Why don't they do some studies about whether kids are better off if their fathers stay home?"

"Maybe they can't find enough families where that happens to make a statistically valid study?" Will put down the business section. "Actually, that's not true. I'm sure they could now. Probably not ten or twenty years ago, though."

"That's probably true. But I don't see it happening much out there," she pointed outside with her chin. "It's all women deciding that two careers are just too much too handle, and so they're going to get out of the game."

Will nodded. "Yeah, I know. But I hear the men are out there, too. I actually just read a profile in the Harvard alumni magazine about a guy who did that. He gave up a successful career in banking and decided to stay home with the kids and raise chickens in the suburbs or something when his wife became chief of oncology at a hospital in Boston."

"Really? Why the profile in the alumni magazine? Ha, can you imagine what would happen if they wrote a profile about every woman who did that?"

Will looked embarrassed. "Well, when the kids got a little older, he started some kind of Internet business that transformed the world out of his home office. You know, the typical Harvard story."

Lizzy had to laugh at that. It was true. Every profile in the Harvard alumni magazine was about an alum who had transformed the world from his or her garage, home or office.

Pensively, Will continued, "You know, I've been thinking about it a little myself. It's a lot of things, kind of coming together. You do a really good job of letting me know what Emma's up to. But I don't know, I guess it was especially when I was in Europe, I just started to notice how much I was missing with her. How much I'd already missed, and how much of that I could never get back. The usual stuff. She's only going to be this little once, and all that. I already don't really remember what she was like when she was first born, except for when I look at pictures. It's just gone, and so much of it I didn't get to see at all."

Lizzy looked at him with some curiosity. Where was this heading? "Yeah, I felt that way when I first went back to work, too. I know what you mean."

"I've been thinking about that, especially about the things that I missed. And I don't want to miss so much going forward." He looked at her speculatively. "I've been thinking, what if I, well, what if I, say, took Emma for one day a week? What if I took her, say, every Friday? Would that be OK with you?"

Lizzy was astounded. She had never in a million years thought he would ever say such a thing. Was she hearing things? "Whoa. By take her, do you mean, you'd stay home with her, without Elena around?"

"Yeah."

In amazement, Lizzy sputtered, "Well, I mean, yeah, of course that's OK with me if that's what you want to do." The practicalities of it, what it would actually mean, started filling her head. "But are you sure? Could you get your job done? Would you do a four-day week with longer hours each day? You're already working 10-hour days."

"No, you're right. I'm still just tossing the idea around. I'd have to think it through. Probably I'd have to do a reorganization in the office."

"What do you mean? Fire people?" She hoped that wasn't it. No way would she want this kind of personal decision to cost anyone his or her job.

"No, no, I mean, redistribute some of the responsibilities I've been holding onto and assign them to other people. You said it before yourself, I do a lot of tasks that I don't have to do. It's the whole micromanaging thing that I inherited from my dad."

Emma started fussing and Lizzy couldn't hear Will very well over the din. She took Emma out of her highchair and nodded for Will to follow her into the living room, where all of Emma's other toys were. They paraded into the room, which was currently festooned with the parts of spring-loaded jumping chair, a Jumperoo, that Will was trying to assemble. The instruction booklet seemed to be missing a couple of vital steps.

"OK, yeah. It's always sounded like there were a lot of things you could let other people do. But, really? You can just do this if you want to? You're not worried that the place will fall apart?" Lizzy couldn't believe her ears. She put Emma on the baby gym mat and gave her some wooden keys to gnaw on. Lizzy and Will sat close together on the sofa.

"Yeah, it's my company. I have to get the board to agree, of course. I think that a couple of the VPs would be happy to take on some of the investor relations stuff, and I know for sure that Carmen wants more responsibility. She told me she did."

"Wow, well,of course, if that's what you want to do. Is that all that's going on here, missing Emma's growth? It's such a big change for you."

"Well—and Georgie, too. She had so much potential, you know, and it just all slipped away, maybe partly because I wasn't there for her. I want to make sure that doesn't happen to Emma." In response to Lizzy's protest, he said, "I know, I know. I want to, just, _be_ there for Emma. Make sure that she knows she can count on me."

Lizzy took his hand. "I think that's a wonderful sentiment. Let's be clear, though. You're not going to be able to see _everything_. There are always going to be some things we both miss, no matter what we do."

"Yeah, I know. I don't think I'll get to see every school play or every field hockey game, but I'd at least like to be sure I see some of them. My dad never saw any of mine, and I won't see any at all, either, unless I change the way I'm doing things."

"Field hockey, huh?" She teased him, unable to resist. Could he have chosen anything preppier? Dressage, maybe. "She has to learn how to walk first. But seriously, of course I see what you mean. I think that's really great."

His dark eyes serious, he asked, "Are you sure? It might cut into your time with Emma. I don't want to step on your toes there."

She squeezed his hand. "What? No, of course not. You wouldn't be. We'll work it out. If you want to do it, I'm right there with you."

He let go of her hand and held out his arm to welcome her into his embrace. "Maybe it won't work out. I'll have to do some investigation, run it by the board. I don't know what they'll think about it. We've never done anything like this before."

"There's a first time for everything, right?"

But who, thought Lizzy, would ever have guessed that the first one doing it at WPD might be Will?

They sat close, his arm around her, and watched Emma grab, roll and swim on the carpet. This incredible, tiny creature who had the inexplicable power to turn the whole world upside down.

* * *

_Please feel free to leave your musings on any of these latest developments below._


	14. Chapter 14

_A/N: Tremendous thanks as always are due to Jan, Barbara, and Alison for their feedback on this chapter._

* * *

**Chapter 14**

**April 2013**

As it turned out, Will had a bit of an uphill battle with the board over the parental leave policies. He had hired a consultant to go over the company's existing policies and to make recommendations about possible changes. The consultant had not only suggested updates to parental leaves, but also advised the company to make flexible working hours and part-time partner-track positions available to both men and women, birth and adoptive parents. He recommended they institute paid sick leave and family care leave policies, and think about setting up some kind of relationship with a nearby childcare center. He had also suggested to Will that he could really put his money where his mouth was, and make a big step toward changing the culture of the company, if he, himself, announced that he would make use of the new policies.

First, though, Will had to get the policies past the board, which was made up primarily of older men who had been there since his father's time. The newer members brought on since Will had taken over the company were more diverse across all imaginable dimensions, but they were still in the minority. It was an interesting, and sometimes volatile, mix.

Will was dying to tell Lizzy about the afternoon board meeting when he came home that evening, and he beckoned her to follow him into the bedroom so he could talk and change his clothes at the same time. Apparently the story couldn't wait till dinner. Lizzy played peekaboo with Emma on the bed while he talked.

"Ha, you should have seen how they sat down at the conference table. All the white-haired old guys on one side, facing off against the women and younger men on the other side. It was wild." He shrugged off his jacket and hung it up in the giant walk-in closet, and then took off his cufflinks and put them in their assigned drawer. Off came the shoes, the tie, the trousers, and he put them all neatly away.

"What did you do?"

"I just laid out the proposal, made the business case for it, sat back and watched them fight it out."

"Did it play out in the obvious way?"

"You mean, all the old guys against and the younger people for? Not entirely. Do you remember Bob Packard?" Lizzy sort of did, from one of the endless investor cocktail parties she'd attended. He was a Raven, of course. A big blustery white guy with a giant W.C. Field nose, she thought.

Will continued, "Well, he actually made this impassioned argument about how it was the right, just thing to do, based on his son's experience of being forced out of his job at Smart because he insisted on taking paternity leave." Smart & Janowitz was a big Wall Street brokerage firm.

"Wow! That's unexpected. Boo," Lizzy said to Emma.

"And Joe Stone"—one of the young Turks—"made a long speech about how the policies would inconvenience and unfairly burden single people or people without children, and would cost the company too much money. The usual arguments." Will poked around among the neat floor-to-ceiling shelves in the closet for a button-down shirt and some jeans.

"So what did you say to that?"

"I didn't have to say anything. Marilyn Henry had this huge stack of data and a Powerpoint presentation, refuting it point by point. You should have seen it." Marilyn was in her sixties and was on a lot of boards, especially those of relatively progressive companies and organizations. She had made her money in IT, and she knew data. So her MO was to collect as much data as she could and just lay the facts right out there for all to see. She'd been helpful to Will in this same way when he had wanted to change WPD's focus to investing in renewable energy companies.

"What? Why did she have that? You didn't know she was going to do that?"

"No, I didn't know, but I guess I should have expected it. She's on the board of another company where they made these kinds of changes a few years ago, and she told me she just asked to borrow their consultant's slides." He pulled on his shirt and jeans, and sat down on the bed next to Lizzy.

"So you didn't need to use any of those statistics you had the researchers collect?"

"Oh, yeah, I did. But it was just icing on the cake after Marilyn's presentation. She did a great job of showing that the ROI(1) on the policies was huge because of increased employee loyalty and morale, lower turnover, retention of the most talented employees, higher productivity, all that."

"Oh, and also, it's the right choice, morally and ethically." Lizzy laughed at him.

"Right, yeah, there's that. Of course most of the board doesn't care about that. Money talks, that's what matters to them. It's their fiduciary responsibility." He pretended to straighten his tie, although he wasn't actually wearing a tie.

"Sure, sure. _Fiduciary responsibility_," Lizzy growled out, still laughing at him.

"So we voted, and agreed to accept the policy changes. It was close, but Bob got a couple of his Raven buddies to vote with him, I don't know how. And that's when I stood up and announced that I was going to use the flexible work-schedule option and take Fridays off to be with Emma, at 80% pay."

She looked up at him in surprise. "Wow! Wow. How did they take that?"

"Pandemonium. Total pandemonium. Skip Schiffer actually said something about my father turning over in his grave. The end of the world as we know it." He rolled his eyes.

"Right. 'Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria,'" Lizzy quoted Bill Murray in _Ghostbusters_ and nodded in agreement.

"I don't know. Maybe we'll lose some investors because of this, but I really think the bottom line will show that we're right, in the end."

"Plus, you're looking forward to spending more time with your daughter, right?" Lizzy tweaked him. He really was just so captivated by the economics that he couldn't see anything else sometimes.

He chuckled self-deprecatingly. "Yeah, of course." He leaned over and tickled Emma's tummy.

Lizzy took his other hand. "I'm really proud of you. That wasn't an easy thing to take a stand on, especially with those particular people."

He shrugged. "You do what you have to do for your family, whether it's, you know, your own little family or the bigger one, the company."

She squeezed his hand and looked up at him with eyes full of admiration. "Not everybody does that, though. And the fact that you _do _is one of the many reasons I love you."

* * *

Lizzy and Emma were visiting Will at his office when Ahmed brought little baby Ava to meet everyone for the first time. She'd been home with him and Phil for a few weeks, but she'd had some medical problems that had kept her from going out and meeting people for a while. Now she was doing well and was ready to face the world. Ahmed had her in a baby carrier just like Emma's.

"We're trying to maximize the whole bonding thing," Ahmed said, pointing to the carrier on his chest. "Not that there's anything _wrong _with strollers, of course."

"No, no, not that there's anything _wrong _with that," Lizzy joked along with him. She handed Emma to Will and came to stand by Ahmed's side so she could peer around and look at the baby. "Wow, she is just adorable. I'm assuming you named her Ava after Ava Gardner, right? Because she totally has Ava Gardner eyes."

Ahmed agreed with great enthusiasm. "I know, right? That's just what I said to Phil, but he didn't see it. He liked the name anyway, though. He has an aunt Ava. So here we are."

He and Lizzy talked babies for a couple of minutes while Will stood listening, distractedly trying to keep Emma from detaching his oh-so-fascinating tie pin and eating it or stabbing him with it. Finally Lizzy glanced over at him and noticed that he wasn't joining in.

"So, Ahmed, have you heard Will's big news?" she asked.

"Well, I did hear a rumor, but I didn't want to, you know, presume anything." Ahmed also turned to look at Will with some curiosity.

He cleared his throat. "Yes, it's true. I'm going to stay home on Fridays to be with Emma, starting at the end of the month. I'm sorry, I know that's going to make scheduling difficult."

Ahmed waved it off. "No, no, don't worry about that. There are lots of people who aren't _ever _available on particular days of the week, for whatever reason, and we always work things out. It's no problem, really."

Will looked puzzled. "Really? You never told me that."

"Oh, sure. I usually don't bother you with the details. Some people take three-day weekends all summer, or save one afternoon a week for golf, or set aside Friday afternoon to get home before sundown for the Sabbath, or that kind of thing. We work around it. Some of the assistants don't even give a reason."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh. You know, it could be a confidential medical situation or something like that, so they just don't say. For example, I could just tell them, 'I'm sorry, Mr. Darcy isn't available on Fridays.' Period. They won't ask why. "

"OK. Yeah, that sounds good. Thank you."

"Of course." Ahmed looked at him speculatively for a moment. "I hope it's not out of line for me to say this, and maybe you have it all worked out exactly what you're going to do with Emma on your day together, but, um, it's a little weird out there for dads with babies."

Lizzy nodded in agreement. "Yes, that's true. It's a woman's world. I've gone for days where Will was the only man I talked to, except for maybe a taxi driver."

"Right. There are lots of activities for moms and babies, but not so many for _dads _and babies. So, just to let you know, um, there's this group, called Daddy and Me, that has playdates on Wednesdays. They meet up somewhere fun in the city every week. They also have some neighborhood groups that might meet on Friday, too."

Will looked a little uncomfortable as he shifted Emma to his other arm.

Ahmed saw his discomfort and seemed to think he knew the reason. He rushed to say, "Oh, you know, it's not all gay dads. I think it's usually at _least_, oh, 75% straight guys. Anyway, I just thought I'd throw that out there. I'm sorry, I hope it wasn't inappropriate."

"Of course not. Thank you. I think it sounds like a really good resource," Lizzy smiled and hastened to reassure him. "We'll check it out."

Will looked a little pained, and once they were alone again, Lizzy asked him why.

"You're not afraid everyone's going to think you're gay, are you? Don't be ridiculous."

"What? No. Who cares about that in this day and age? I just wonder who these guys are. Are they, uh, you know, a bunch of unemployed slackers? I don't have anything in common with people like that."

"Well, I don't know. I guess you'll have to go and see for yourself. But I would guess that the stay-at-home dads do it for a lot of different reasons, same as stay-at-home moms. Anyway, why are _you _thinking about doing it, even if it's only one day a week?"

"OK, all right, I get your point," he grumbled. "God, I'm turning into some kind of damn hippie or something." His lips twitched a little at one corner, so she knew he wasn't serious.

Lizzy looked over his bespoke suit and his Rolex and his manicured fingernails and all the other markers of wealth and power he wore so effortlessly, and cut loose with a big laugh. "Yeah, I don't think you have much to worry about there, sweetie, unless you're secretly wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt under the rest of that."

* * *

In mid-April, while in line to buy tickets outside the Bronx Zoo, Lizzy received a very unexpected call from Naomi Goodwin, the Dean at Yale Law School.

"Lizzy," Dean Goodwin said. "I have a problem, and I wondered if maybe the solution might be good for both you and me."

Lizzy was flattered that Dean Goodwin had thought of her, of course, but she had no idea what she might be talking about.

"A faculty member just came to see me to let me know that she's having a baby in early October, so she won't be able to teach her classes fall semester. Now I have to scramble to find teaching replacements, because students have already registered for classes. Leah Hoffman told me you might be looking for some kind of an academic appointment. Would you be interested in teaching a class, just one, on national security law and human rights? I thought you'd be a great match for it."

Lizzy stepped out of line and into a quiet corner of the entrance courtyard so she could hear better.

"Wow. That's—I'm incredibly honored that you would ask me. Wow. I guess...I'm sure I'll have a lot of questions, but I'm not sure what they are just yet."

"Yes, I'm sorry to hit you with this out of the blue. It's only an adjunct position, and it doesn't pay very much—" Dean Goodwin went on to tell her all the details. Lizzy told her she'd get back to her about it as soon as possible.

After they'd hung up, Lizzy texted Will and asked him to call her when he could. That was their code for "nothing's wrong, but I want to talk to you soon." About an hour later, after he got out of a meeting, he called while she and Emma were checking out the giraffes in the African Plains exhibit. Emma kicked and cooed and reached for the giraffes, which were awfully cute.

"So," Lizzy concluded, "it's a seminar, it meets once a week on Wednesdays, and it won't have more than 15 students. What do you think? Purely from a practical standpoint, could we manage that? It's an hour and a half each way from Penn Station to New Haven on the Acela."(2)

"Do you think you can handle it? You sound really excited about the idea."

And she was, she realized. She was breathless with excitement, actually. Lizzy looked up at the trees, where the pleasant spring sun was peeking through the new leaves. "Yeah, I am. But when I think about it practically, I'm not so sure. It won't start until September. It's hard for me to know how I'll feel by then."

"OK. Let's keep talking about it. When do you have to let Dean Goodwin know?"

"By the beginning of next week, at the latest. She needs to get this settled ASAP."

"Sounds good. Look, I have to run to another meeting. Oh, don't forget, we have the WPD spring gala tomorrow night."

Lizzy thought, _ugh_. She was not a big fan of the party that WPD put on every spring to thank its investors and attract new ones. But of course she didn't say that. And at least she didn't have to plan it. That was all left up to Will's social organizer.

"Don't worry, I hadn't forgotten," she said. "Gabby is going to watch Emma for us. We're good to go."

* * *

And indeed the next evening Lizzy found herself sitting very still, with her eyes closed, in a special chair in her bathroom as a professional stylist named Petra finished applying her makeup. Lizzy was squeezed, with the aid of some incredibly powerful super-elastic, cantilevered undergarments, into a spangly aqua designer evening gown chosen with the help of a personal shopper at Saks. It was broiling hot under the cape protecting the dress, and she despised the smell and stiffness of hairspray and the way the sprayed-on foundation made her skin feel. It had to be done, though, so she did it and tried to be gracious and to keep her grumpiness and complaints to herself.

Ah, the gala. How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways, she thought, trying not to twitch her nose or sneeze. Lizzy always puzzled over how to say that word, gala. GAY-la? GAH-la? GAL-a? Since before she and Will had gotten married, she had always dutifully gone to the gala and smiled and socialized, but she felt deeply uncomfortable with the schmoozing in a way that she didn't at a regular business function. It was hard hitting people up for money, thanking them for what they'd already delivered while asking for still more. Will was really good at it, since he'd had so much practice at it over the years as he'd recruited investors for WPD and donors for the Fitzwilliam-Darcy Trust. So Lizzy dutifully stood by, smiling ornamentally, and let him do his thing. And this year she wouldn't even be able to mention her job as a starting point in the conversation, giving her something to talk about with the men, because she didn't _have _a job. Crap.

Finally Petra gave her one last brush of powder and tucked one final piece of hair up before whipping off the cape and pronouncing her ready for business. Will called from the bedroom to see if she was ready, so Lizzy thanked Petra, stood up, jammed on her high heels, and headed into the bedroom while Petra packed up her masses of heavy equipment.

When she walked in, Will looked up from adjusting his cufflinks, and suddenly she thought his eyes were going to pop right out of his head. She'd never seen him look like that before.

"What?" she said, feeling around self-consciously to check whether she'd had a nip slip or forgotten to zip up something crucial.

"Wow. Wow. You look great."

He seemed physically incapable of taking his eyes off her chest, so she glanced down to see what the big deal was. And big appeared to be the operative word. The dress was reasonably low-cut, and, courtesy of breastfeeding and the cantilevered undergarment, it seemed she had unwittingly acquired a rather impressive, Rubenesque décolletage. The necklace he'd given her for Christmas, the one with a diamond pendant pointing like a neon sign straight down at her two cheeky gals, didn't exactly draw the eyes away, either.

She held aloft an imaginary trophy and said grandly, "I'd like to thank the Academy for this award, and also my daughter, Emma, for providing me with this fabulous rack, which apparently my husband finds irresistible."

Will laughed and came over to kiss her. She stiff-armed him, though, and said, "Sorry, I'd love to, really I would, but it took two hours to paint this face on, and I can't screw it up now. Petra would never forgive me."

So Will bent down and kissed her somewhat lower instead, which was why she was giggling and squealing when the intercom in the living room rang a moment later to let them know that the car was waiting for them downstairs. They kissed Emma goodbye, turning around to wave to her and Gabby in the foyer as they boarded the elevator to the lobby.

The gala was in the Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Gardens, all done up in fairy lights that spilled from the greenhouse and out under a tent in the gardens. It was fantastic, of course. Will's social planner really knew what she was doing, thought Lizzy. When the guests started to come in, Lizzy plastered on her very best society matron smile and welcomed them as Will easily conversed with board members and friends of his parents, people he'd known most of his life. She was relieved, though, to see some younger people come in, too, including several couples she knew and liked from Will's club. See, this won't be so bad, she thought to herself as she was able to say more sincere hellos to Stephen and Valerie, Carla and Hal, and other friendly faces as they arrived.

And she did have a nice time chatting with those couples after she and Will closed down the receiving line and drifted inside the beautiful Victorian greenhouse full of glass, metal, and tropical greenery. They hadn't seen several of the couples since Emma's birth. Lizzy enjoyed catching up with them, and Will clearly did as well.

After that, though, it was back to business with the pillars of society. Lizzy smiled and nodded and agreed while Will talked to the men about golf and sailing and the stock market and the Yankees and cigars and other manly things.

While this was going on, one of the wives, Mrs. Pendleton, who apparently did not have her own first name, very kindly turned to Lizzy, and said,

"Hello, dear. It's lovely to see you again. How are you?"

Lizzy smiled back and said, "How are _you_?" because Will had taught her it was never polite to actually answer that question. "I heard from Will that you had been ill." She thought it was something pretty serious, though she couldn't remember exactly what. Mrs. Pendleton looked and dressed kind of like Queen Elizabeth, and she was one of the truly nice ones in the Raven crowd.

"Oh, it was nothing, just some surgery. Did I just hear from Will that you're at home full time now?" She smoothly changed the subject.

Lizzy nodded, not sure where this was going, but gamely playing along.

"That's wonderful. I suppose you'll have time to spend with the Trust now? I was a friend of Will's mother Anne, you know, and I spent a lot of time with her at the Trust, when she was just getting it off the ground. She was so wonderful and kind. It's a shame you never met her. I _loved _the work she was doing, funding art classes for less fortunate children. They were so sweet, and so grateful, you know."

Lizzy smiled and nodded at the elegant, if frail, older woman. "Yes, Will has told me so much about her, and what a lovely person she was." OK, that was stretching things a bit, but what the hell? Mrs. Pendleton was old-fashioned, and her heart was in the right place.

"And I see you and Will have continued that work. What else has the Trust been doing these days? I'm afraid I haven't been feeling well enough to follow it lately."

"Oh, of course, I'm sorry," Lizzy said sympathetically. Someone bumped into her from behind, and, the sound of a glass smashing on the tile floor distracted her enough that she didn't think to censor her next words properly. "Well, we've mainly been working to establish an integrated treatment network for at-risk teenagers, you know, drugs, and suicide and alcoholism, that kind of thing. AIDS, of course."

Mrs. Pendleton's penciled eyebrows rocketed up to her '50s bouffant hairline. "Oh, my," she breathed.

Lizzy missed it because she had craned her head around just then to see what was going on with the broken glass. She continued her earlier thought as she turned back to face Mrs. Pendleton.

"And, we're currently considering a proposal to make a major donation to a shelter for battered and homeless women in Harlem." Mrs. Pendleton now looked positively stricken. She was so startled that she started coughing and clutched at her husband's arm for support.

Damn, Lizzy thought, why had she said all that? After all this time she knew better. She should just have said, "'We're doing work in support of underprivileged women and children" or "we're helping the homeless" or something innocuous and _noblesse oblige_-ish like that.

Lizzy hurriedly looked around and signaled for a waiter to come over and asked him to get Mrs. Pendleton a glass of water.

"I'm so sorry, Mrs. Pendleton. Are you all right?" Lizzy asked.

In a moment the waiter came back with the glass of water on his tray of _hors d'oeuvres,_ and Lizzy handed it to Mrs. Pendleton. Lizzy felt terrible about having shocked the poor woman. She smiled and gestured back at the waiter, who had been hanging back to see if Mrs. Pendleton wanted to return the glass to him.

"Canapé, anyone?" Lizzy asked eagerly.

She heard herself say the words, and suddenly she was seized by a ridiculous and absolutely unstoppable urge to laugh her head off.

Oh. My. God., she thought to herself. I can't believe I just said that.

She put her hand up to her mouth and tried to strangle her laugh into a cough somehow. "Could you excuse me for a minute, please?" she said between gasps to Mr. and Mrs. Pendleton. "I'm sorry. Excuse me."

She tripped off as quickly as she could further into the greenhouse, where she plopped down onto a wrought iron bench elegantly situated amongst wild green tropical trees and plants and laughed until she cried. Thank God her mascara was waterproof, and she sure hoped the rest of the stuff on her face was properly shellacked on, too. Just as she was calming down, she noticed that she was surrounded by giant Venus flytraps and some other carnivorous plants, which struck her somehow as being strangely appropriate, and that set her off again.

Will had of course seen her leave the main room, and he followed her in a moment later. He sat down next to her and rubbed her back. "What's wrong, sweetheart?" He handed her his handkerchief.

She took it, still shaking with laughter, and carefully dabbed at her eyes. "Oh, my God. I was standing there talking to Mrs. Pendleton, and then suddenly I realized that I've quit my fucking job and I'm serving fucking canapés to your investors," she gasped, twisting her face up into a comical moue. It was exactly what she had sworn she would never, ever do, and she'd even left him once, long ago when they were first starting out together, because that was the kind of wife he had wanted.

He barked out a little laugh, too, before he managed to rein it back in. Obviously he remembered it as well. "Oh God, is right." He sat and rubbed her back while she regained her composure.

"I think I just need to sit here for a minute and catch my breath. I'll be all right. Let's talk about it after this is all over. Tomorrow, maybe. I think, uh...I think maybe this is kind of a sign. You know, a sign that I should take the job at Yale. I think I need to get back into it. Have something of my own again, my own identity." She took a deep breath and leaned her head on his shoulder.

"Yeah." He nodded. "I understand. I think it's a good idea, too."

* * *

When they got home a little after midnight, Emma had just waked up and was crying on Gabby's shoulder while the babysitter was warming up a bottle. Lizzy took Emma from her while Gabby gave them the Emma report. Then they said goodnight and she headed downstairs with her pay and cab fare in hand.

Lizzy took Emma into the bedroom and laid the baby down on the bed while trying to squirm out of the top of the spangly dress. Damn. It was impossible. She called for Will to come help her.

As he unzipped her, he said drily, "I have to admit that I was looking forward to getting you out of this dress, but not under these exact circumstances."

"Thanks," she said as she managed to wiggle out of the top. "Wait, don't go anywhere just yet. I need help with this thing, this deathtrap, too." She pointed to her gravity-defying undergarment. "Sorry, I have no idea how it unlatches or whatever it does. Or where." He inspected it for a few moments before discovering a series of hidden hooks in the back.

"Wow, that's some sophisticated engineering there," he commented as it all popped apart in his hands. He whisked it away.

"That's what it takes to get me all in the right place and looking beautiful these days," she said, lying down on the bed, pulling up the covers, and finally, finally getting her full breast up to Emma's moving mouth, which had been phantom-nursing during the disassembling process.

"No, it doesn't." He had that look in his eye.

"Hold that thought, OK?" she smiled up at him. "Let me get her down, and I'll meet you in the guest room in, what, twenty minutes?" She knew that a lot of parents in the world, in places where the whole family slept together, just did it in the bed with the kids, but she couldn't bring herself to do that.

He shook his head no, took off his suit, and spooned up behind her in his shorts, propped up on his elbow so he could look over her shoulder to watch Emma nurse.

Eventually they did manage to stumble together to the dimly lit guest room for an enthusiastic, though by now very sleepy, lovemaking session.

Afterwards, rolling over onto her side, she made the mistake of looking down to see the devastation that pregnancy and childbirth had left behind on her once-lithe body.

"Oh God, you really don't mind all these squishy bits?" She poked her stomach with her index finger and watched the flesh fall back. The stretch marks had faded to silver now, but everything was irreversibly altered. She mourned the loss of her youthful physique, which she realized now she had never properly appreciated while she'd still had it.

"What?" he said, unable to tear his eyes off the territory further to the North.

"Down here."

"Oh," he said dismissively. "You know that's not where my interests lie."

She snickered, "Aha, so the bodacious tatas overshadow everything else, huh?"

"Literally, to my great delight," he said, reaching for her.

"God, what is it with men and boobs?"

"If you have to ask, you'll never understand."

"Hey! Ouch! Emma bit me there with her new tooth just now."

"Stop?" he asked, worried.

"No—try over there." She pointed. "But remember, Emma has dibs now, and she doesn't know how to share yet."

"Mmmmph."

"What?"

"I won't impinge on her territory. Too much. It's not fair, though."

"What's not fair?"

"She gets to go to second base with you every two hours, and I don't," he teased.

"Hmm. You know what isn't fair? That parenthood has turned me into—" she tried to think of the right comparison— "Shelley Winters, or Madea or something, while you're still Cary Grant. God, look at you!"

"Seriously? Do you really think that about yourself?" he asked, suddenly sober.

In a small voice, she said, "Well...yeah." She looked up at the ceiling.

He sat up a little to get a better look at her new expanses. She heard him clear his throat, as if he knew it was really important to get this right.

"That's...no. I don't know how to say how...beautiful you are to me. No, really, I mean it."

"But now I look so—motherly. Motherly isn't sexy."

"Excuse me, but do I look like I think you're not sexy? Did I look that way earlier tonight?"

She had to admit that, in all his glory, he most decidedly did not, had not.

"Even though it's all changed? Nothing's where it was before."

"If it hadn't changed, we wouldn't have Emma. And that's just—it's unthinkable."

"Thanks." She paused as she looked him over appraisingly in return. "I almost wish you had some scars, too, though, to even things out."

"Oh, I do, but only on the inside." He smirked, and then paused before going on more seriously. "I'm starting to fall apart, you know. I think I need knee surgery. Maybe back surgery, too. I don't know how much longer I'll be able to play squash without it."

She put her hand on his shoulder in concern. "Really? Why didn't you say anything before?"

"Don't want you to think you married an old man." He pointed to the gray hairs at his temple.

"Right. You just get more distinguished while I turn into a wizened old crone. Like I said, it's not fair."

"Oh, but you're _my _wizened old crone." He waggled his eyebrows suggestively.

"Shut up," she laughed. "You're not helping."

"More like a stone-age fertility goddess," he said, kissing her neck.

"Let's not put that part to the test just yet, OK?"

He agreed. They fell asleep in each other's arms and miraculously, miraculously, slept until 5:30, when Emma's wails heralded the breaking of another dawn, the beginning of another bright new day full of promise, expectation, and even more change.

* * *

_Footnotes:_

(1) ROI means "return on investment." Everybody loves a high ROI.

(2) The Acela is the "high speed" train running up and down the Northeast corridor, i.e. from Boston south to Providence, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. With all those stops, of course it doesn't actually go very fast, especially not compared to the TGV in France or the Shinkansen in Japan. It's still a lot faster than the snail-like local train, of course.

* * *

_Any thoughts on canapés, aging bodies, or greenhouses? Leave 'em just below, please._


	15. Chapter 15

_A/N: Thanks as always to Jan, Barbara, and Alison._

* * *

**Chapter 15**

**April and May, 2013**

By the end of April, Lizzy had told Dean Goodwin she was happy to accept the offer to teach one class at Yale in September, and Will was preparing to begin taking Fridays off to be with Emma. They both had a lot to do as a result.

Will was working hard with his temporary PA to clear his schedule on Fridays and to pack all his work into the four remaining days a week. He was also negotiating with his staff to clarify what their new roles and responsibilities would be, now that he was finally handing off some of the jobs he should have delegated to others long ago. He told Lizzy that he knew his VPs would do a great job schmoozing with investors, communicating with the managers of companies they'd invested in, and other tasks he had been in the habit of monopolizing and micromanaging himself. It was hard to let them go, he said, but he knew it was the right thing to do. The VPs might be even better at these things than he was, who could tell?

Lizzy started working in earnest on sketching out her class for the fall, preparing lesson plans and ordering books and all of that. She was also still working hard on her law review article, and started to make the trek up to the Columbia University law library whenever she could to use the resources and quiet workspace there. She had access because she was an alum.

Lizzy and Will had discussed their changing needs with Elena, and they had all agreed that she would now come on Monday afternoons and all day Wednesday. This was what their schedule would be in September, so why not start now? Elena said she liked this schedule better, anyway, because it meant she could take a three-day weekend and visit her son in Baltimore whenever she wanted. And, she said, she certainly wasn't going to complain about a change in her working hours when they were already paying her a five-day-a-week salary for a day and a half of work.

And so it was that just before 9 o'clock on the first Friday morning in May, Will and Lizzy were nearly prepared for their first day of the new arrangement. The freezer was full of tubes of frozen breastmilk, and the box of rice cereal was on the kitchen counter alongside some jars of baby food. Lizzy was dressed for casual Friday, had her computer bag slung over her shoulder, and was in the living room poised to head off to the law library. Will and Emma were snuggled up on the sofa, and Emma looked like she might actually take a little nap. She'd been awake since 5:30, again.

"All set?" Lizzy asked.

"Yeah, I think so. I think we'll just hang around here this morning, and maybe go to the aquarium later."

"OK, sounds good. I'll be at the library, so you can text me if you need me." Suddenly, she realized she'd forgotten something important. "Shit. I totally forgot. The cleaning crew comes in a little after 9 o'clock on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. So we have to clean up all the baby stuff before they get here. You also might want to take Emma out while they're here, because she can't stand the sounds or the smells."

"What? We have to clean for the cleaners?" Will asked incredulously.

Lizzy nodded. "Yeah, of course. We have to give them some actual flat surfaces to, you know, scrub and dust and vacuum and all that."

Even more incredulously, Will asked, "So what exactly are we paying them to do?"

"The hard part, that's what. Do you want me to give you a hand?" She set down her computer bag. "We have to fold up the baby gym, and throw all the toys into the toybox, and clean all the crap off the table in the breakfast nook, and—"

"And you do this _every other day_?"

She shrugged and stopped picking up toys. "How else do you think it looks this good all the time? Whatever, we can see what happens if we don't do it. It'll probably be OK, but it'll take longer for them to finish, maybe an hour? Less if we clean up first, maybe 30 minutes. I think you're still better off taking Emma out, though."

Will sighed heavily and stood up. "I wish you'd told me before. Can you take her for a minute? I'll be right back. I just want to change so we can go out." Lizzy apologized again and took Emma, and stood looking down at her as her little baby eyelids fluttered just a little. Lizzy rocked her gently and hummed a tuneless song.

A moment later Will came back in, wearing a blue button-down shirt instead of the Harvard t-shirt he'd had on before.

"I think if we put her down in her crib, she might actually stay asleep," Lizzy whispered. She and Will walked together back down the hall to Emma's room and returned a few minutes later when Lizzy's prediction proved accurate.

"So, you didn't know that light housekeeping was in the job description, huh?" Lizzy teased him.

"No, I guess not," he answered, clearly chagrined.

"I'm sorry. You don't have to do it," she said.

"It's OK, I will. You just go, do your thing. This is _your _time. Go ahead."

Lizzy examined his face closely, to make sure he wasn't mad and just being passive-aggressive. It could be hard to tell, with him.

"You're sure?" she asked, just in case.

"Yeah, really. She's sleeping, anyway. What else would I do?" Actually, Lizzy could think of a million things she would do if their circumstances were reversed, but she kept her thoughts to herself.

"All right." She kissed him and picked up her bag. "Love you. See you around 5:30? Maybe before?"

He nodded, and walked her to the door.

"Do you have the new diaper bag ready?" she asked. They had bought him a black messenger-bag-style diaper bag because he had been uncomfortable with the thought of carrying around the big flowery one they usually used.

"Yeah, I'm good to go. Don't worry."

On her way down in the elevator, she almost turned back a few times, to see what he was doing, to find out if he was really tidying up the apartment. But she didn't. Curiosity killed the cat, after all.

* * *

Lizzy arrived home at about 5 o'clock, a little earlier than planned. Frankly, she wanted to know how Will and Emma had done, but she didn't want it to seem like she was checking up on them. With that in mind, she had resisted phoning him from the library on multiple occasions. He had texted her a couple of times during the day, so she knew that they had indeed gone out when the cleaners had come in and woken Emma up, and then had spent an hour or so at the aquarium watching the sea otters swim around and around.

When she walked in the door, Will and Emma were playing on the baby gym on the living room floor. Lizzy knelt down and gave them both big kisses and hugs.

"Hey, you two. How did it go?"

Will flopped down flat on his back on the carpet, his arms out wide. "I'm exhausted. And bored out of my skull. And totally in love. All at the same time."

Lizzy laughed, reaching out to stroke his side. "I know. Isn't it amazing?"

And that's when she knew for sure it was all going to be OK.

* * *

The next week, Will took Emma to the carousel in the Children's Zone in Central Park. He'd gone there as a kid with his nanny and really liked it. Lizzy had forgotten all about it, if she'd ever really noticed it. She'd always been too busy rushing around for work to pay attention to things like that, before Emma. But it turned out that Will knew about a lot of places for kids in the city because he'd grown up there. As a result, he was able to give Emma the full tour, a totally different experience of the city than the one she was getting from Lizzy. Lizzy thought that was great.

"Was the carousel as good as you remembered?" she asked that evening, sitting down on the living room floor next to Will. He was holding Emma up by the arms as she tried to stand up.

"Oh, yeah, even better, probably. They've fixed it up a lot. It was in bad shape when I was a kid. You know, the city was in bankruptcy, and they weren't maintaining anything back then." Emma's legs collapsed under her, so Will pulled her up to standing again.

"Right. What else did you do in the park?"

"We went to the playground to watch the other kids play. I don't quite get the point, since she's too little to get out of the carrier and actually do much of anything, though."

"You didn't help her slide down the slide, or put her in the swing or anything?" Lizzy couldn't help inquiring as she swiped some carpet fuzz off of Emma's leg.

"Oh, sure, of course. Mostly we sat on the bench and watched the squirrels, though. She thought they were great, really funny. They were chasing each other around super fast and fighting and making that _ack ack_ sound."

"That's our girl," Lizzy sang, chucking Emma under the chin. Emma responded by sitting down suddenly.

"Also, she didn't like the swing very much. I think maybe she gets motion sick."

"Aha, just like her poor daddy," Lizzy teased, leaning her head against Will's shoulder.

Emma scooted her way over to the sofa and tried unsuccessfully to pull herself up.

"Hmmph. Maybe. So here's an odd thing. You know how when we go to the park together with Emma, we sometimes share a bench with someone, or end up talking about the kids with moms on the playground?"

Lizzy shrugged, "Yeah, I guess so."

"That didn't happen today, or at least not so much. When I put Emma in the swing, the mom, or nanny, or whatever she was, next to me pulled her kid out of the swing and they walked away."

"Maybe the kid was just through with the swing."

"No. It happened too many times to be a coincidence. I think they think a guy out with a kid must be some kind of scary monster." Will picked Emma up and cuddled her until she struggled away and started inching toward the sofa again.

"Seriously?" Lizzy found that surprising. "I would have thought the baby would be a huge chick magnet, like a puppy. Really, nobody came over to check you out?"

Will's ears turned a little red. "Well, I guess there was a little of that."

Lizzy laughed at him. "Of course there was. Who could stay away?"

"No, but seriously, the other thing was happening, too. I'm not making it up."

"So, a sort of repulsion-attraction thing going on. Do you think that's what Ahmed meant when he said things were weird for dads out there?"

Will nodded. "Maybe. It _is _peculiar being the only one there all the time."

"But we know you're _not _the only one. Do you want to try that— what did he call it?— Daddy and Me thing?"

Will leaned back on his elbows, looking at the ceiling. Emma thought that was interesting, so she changed course and crept back in his direction.

"Yeah, maybe. I'll think about it."

Lizzy's stomach rumbled. She looked down at him and put her hand on his knee. "Got any thoughts about dinner?"

"My main thought about dinner is that I want someone to put it right in front of me with no further effort expended on my part. I don't even want to think about where to get the delivery delivered from."

Lizzy snickered and said, "You just lie there and I'll dangle bonbons over your mouth. But seriously, and I know this isn't going to solve our problem tonight, but I had a thought about this. We're too tired to cook, and eating takeout all the time isn't good for us. One of Louisa's friend told me about a service that can bring you a week's worth of really good home-cooked meals, and all you have to do is heat them up. What do you think?"

"So you're still against the idea of a live-in cook slash housekeeper slash chauffeur slash nanny?" he teased.

She shot him a dirty look. "Be serious, Darcy. She told me it tastes good and it's, I don't know, organic and local or something. I know it's going to get hard when I'm working more, and I think this might be a good idea."

"Organic, really?" he raised his head to ask doubtfully. He collapsed back onto the carpet. "Well, OK. We can give it a try. I certainly can't cook."

"Tonight or any night," she said, giving him a little nudge.

"Nothing either of us would want to eat, anyway."

* * *

Lizzy hadn't seen or talked much with Charlotte for a few weeks, and so she thought it was time to catch up. They arranged to have lunch near Charlotte's office so she could run back to work afterwards.

Lizzy arranged Emma in her high chair and whipped out a rubber placemat with suction cups to hold it to the table. She distracted Emma by laying out some mushy banana chunks on the placemat while she and Charlotte ordered and talked.

"Just the chopped salad for me, please," Lizzy said to the hipster-doofus waiter as she clapped the menu shut. To Charlotte, she confided, "Getting a little too _zaftig _lately."

"Same for me," said Charlotte to the waiter, handing over her menu. "So, what's new with you guys?"

"Actually, some big changes are afoot. One, I'm going to teach a class at Yale in the fall."

"Really? You're not enjoying your life as a lady of leisure?" Charlotte's mouth turned up a little sarcastically as she said this.

"Oh, come off it, Charlotte."

"Sorry." Charlotte gazed blandly at Lizzy over the top of her water glass.

"I think it'll be good for me, a way to get back into working again. If I don't get out there in the adult world again, I'm going to go crazy."

Charlotte glanced at her sharply. "Look, Lizzy, I appreciate that you've had a hard time. But frankly, I'm getting sick of hearing about it."

Lizzy looked at Charlotte as if she had suddenly come unhinged. Were they really going to do this little dance again?

"Um...I'm sorry?" she snapped. "First you were on my case for quitting my job, and now you're pissed off that I'm going back to work? God, I can't do anything right, apparently."

Charlotte waited a beat. "No, I'm sorry. That was too much." Her face twisted a little in a way Lizzy couldn't quite read.

Lizzy reached around Emma to touch Charlotte's hand and asked, "What's going on, C?"

"Look, I'm trying to be sympathetic, really I am. But I don't think you quite get that you have a choice here that most of us don't." Charlotte sounded very bitter, and she pulled her hand away, pretending it was just to pick up her water glass.

"What do you mean?"

"Come on. You married a rich guy, and you don't need to work, have a paying job, whatever the hell we're supposed to call it now. And you can just, you know, _dabble _like this, if you want to. Most of us, here in the real world, don't have that luxury." She looked Lizzy in the eye, her own flashing with anger.

For a minute, Lizzy seriously considered getting up and walking out of the restaurant. If the money was going to come between them like this always and forever, what was the damn point of trying to stay friends? On the other hand, Charlotte's response seemed kind of disproportionate to Lizzy's supposed crime. Maybe there was something deeper here, something a good friend should try to figure out instead of running away. So she didn't get up.

Instead, she took a big breath and said, in measured tones, "I'm not going to be _dabbling_. I'm making a carefully considered career move that I hope will actually make my life work. And anyway I thought you _liked _your job."

"I _do _like my job, in spite of all my complaints about my stupid boss. Except for the money, I _am _happy. I'm also tired and totally at my limit." Charlotte slammed down her glass.

"So, why are you mad at me, if you're happy with your situation? Why can't I choose that, too?"

"You have a choice. Why aren't you taking advantage of it?" Charlotte's voice rose.

Lizzy leaned across the table toward Charlotte. "Why are you assuming that, because I have a choice, the right choice, really the _only _choice, is for me to stay home?"

Emma squawked so Lizzy distractedly put some more bananas on her tray.

Then she went on. "I don't _want _to stay home all the time. It's been good, but I need to get back out there. Because I 'have a choice,' does it mean I am required to make the choice that will make me unhappy, just because that life would make someone else happy? Or because someone else thinks it's the ideal life? That's not much of a choice, if you ask me."

Charlotte stared at the tabletop and didn't answer for a while. Finally she said, "No, you're right. Maybe I'm just jealous."

"I wish you had that choice, too, Charlotte. I'm sorry you don't. Really, I mean it. I want you to be happy. You know that."

Emma started massaging bananas into her hair as she watched Lizzy and Charlotte's back-and-forth curiously.

"And anyway, if you had a choice, would you want to stay home?" Lizzy asked.

"We'll never know, will we?" Again, Charlotte sounded very bitter as she slumped back into her chair.

The waiter arrived at their table and clunked their salads down in front of them.

Charlotte sat back up, picked up her fork and stabbed a tomato. "But actually, I think the answer is no. I wouldn't want to stay home, at least not all the time. But I know lots and lots of women who would, if they could. And I've known lots of women at work over the years who have quit their jobs to be with their kids, even though they really struggled trying to make ends meet on their husbands' salaries alone."

"I'm glad they found a way to live their dream, and do what they thought was best for them and their families."

"Me, too."

Lizzy took a bite of avocado. It was good, nice and soft and ripe, so she put a piece of it on Emma's placemat to see if she would eat it, too.

"So are you still mad at me because that's not _my _dream?" Lizzy looked at Charlotte, who was just picking at her salad now.

"No." She paused. "I guess I wish I had more choices, even though I'm pretty happy with what I've got."

Lizzy nodded. She could understand that.

Charlotte put down her fork and pronounced, "And it's a good thing, too, because Liam just got laid off."

Shit. So that's what this was all about. "Oh, man. I'm really sorry." Lizzy tried reaching out her hand again, and this time Charlotte didn't pull away.

"They closed down his store and let him go. We had to pull Chloe out of daycare this week because we can't afford it anymore. So, you see, I don't really have any choice at all."

"God. I'm so sorry. How are you doing? How's Liam taking it?"

Charlotte shrugged. "I don't know. Mixed. I've always made more than him, but now, being totally dependent on my income...Let's just say that he's tossed around the word 'emasculated' more than once in the last week."

"Oof." Lizzy squeezed Charlotte's hand sympathetically.

"On the other hand, he might actually be able to spend more time on his art, so there may be an upside. He's talking with some other families in the neighborhood about doing a childcare co-op kind of thing. They'd switch off days or something so he'd get some time to work on his sculpture." She picked up her water glass and swirled the ice around.

Lizzy remembered the construction dust and power tools lying around their apartment and wondered if that was such a good idea. "Is the playroom all done, then?"

"Yup, we finished it last month, so that part is OK, at least."

"So tell me more about how this is playing out. Is the idea that Liam will look for another job right away? He's got a degree in fine arts, right?"

Charlotte talked for a while about her conversations with Liam about this, about whether this whole thing was really a blessing in disguise as it seemed to him, or a disaster, as it seemed to her. Lizzy listened and commiserated. This was really tough stuff.

After a while, Charlotte said, "You said there was some other news with you, before. What's going on?"

Lizzy didn't feel like this was the right time for her to bring up the fact that Will was staying home with Emma one day a week by choice. In fact, she could imagine this piece of good news ending her friendship with Charlotte. "Oh, nothing. It doesn't matter. I want to hear more about your plans."

Charlotte's phone rang.

She let out a big, frustrated sigh. "Oh, God. Sorry, I should take it." She pulled her phone out of her bag and punched 'send' to pick up. "This is Charlotte Lucas." Lizzy watched Charlotte's face change from sad resignation to something else altogether as she listened to what the person on the other end of the phone was saying.

"Uh-huh. Uh-huh. OK, I'll be there." Charlotte was grinning ear to ear by the time the call ended. Then she sat in stunned, disbelieving silence before she let out a shriek of joy that she quickly tried to stifle by clamping both hands over her mouth.

Lizzy grinned back at her. "What is it?" She hadn't seen Charlotte this happy for a very, very long time.

"I have a job interview! I can't believe it. When Liam got his notice, I just...I was so freaked out and hopeless, and I couldn't see how we were going to make it, so I got on that jobs site, and I sent out a bunch of résumés. Most of the jobs were total reaches. I never in a million years dreamed that anything would come of it. But holy shit, I got an interview at the International Fund for Children!"

"That's fantastic, Char! Wow! Good for you! You've been doing amazing work in spite of all of Angela's crazy ideas. I'm not surprised at all."

"It's a pretty high-level position in their communications department. Oh my God," she gasped, clapping her hands to her cheeks. "I've been stuck at AmeriCaring for so long, I have no idea how to do a job interview anymore." Charlotte got all panicky and started to shred her paper napkin.

"Char, is there some way I can help?"

Charlotte stopped and seemed to turn it over in her mind, maybe trying to decide whether to be offended or not. "Like what?" she asked cautiously.

"How about, I don't know, a mock job interview?"

"You're not in my field. Not in business."

"No, but Will is."

"What?"

"Yeah. He's not just a nice ass and a pretty face. He's really good at what he does, and I bet he could give you some great pointers. How about it?"

"He would do that for me? Isn't he too important for that?" Charlotte vibrated with insecurity.

"I'm sure he would if I asked, and if he's available. I've told him about the stuff you've worked on. He knows you're good."

Charlotte thought about this for a minute. "Huh. Well, if it wouldn't be too much trouble. My interview is in two days, though."

"OK, how about tonight? We could have dinner at our place, and then Liam and I can watch the kids while you and Will do a run-through. Whaddaya say?"

Charlotte agreed, still cautiously, and they called their respective mates to see if it might be possible. It was. Will was very pleased to hear that something had gone right for Charlotte for a change, and was only too happy to help.

"Are you sure?" Charlotte asked Lizzy.

"Of course. That's what friends are for. How are you guys going to come over?"

"It's supposed to rain, so taxi, probably. Why?"

"Bring Chloe's trike, OK? I have a plan."

And that's what they did. After dinner, Will and Charlotte sat at the dining room table, which they had set up like an office, and talked through how the interview was likely to proceed. He had done a little research, made a few calls, and gotten some information through his many back channels about the new directions the ICF was taking in their communications strategy. He shared that with her and they talked about how her experience at AmeriCaring and her professional strengths might fit into it, and what she could bring to the organization.

Meanwhile, Lizzy, Liam, Chloe and Emma all went into the big entertaining space off the living room, the ballroom or whatever it was, the one they never used. It had some folded-up tables and stacked-up chairs at one end, but other than that it was empty except for the gilt-framed mirrors on the wall. Lizzy dragged Emma's baby gym in from the living room and built a wall around it with some throw pillows. She, Liam and Emma sat in their little fort while Chloe rode her trike around the perimeter of the room as fast as she could, screeching with joy, her brown curls streaming behind her. She only occasionally crashed into the pillows or the tables and chairs, and a great time was had by all. Lizzy decided to talk to Will about making the place into a permanent playroom for Emma.

And by the next week, Charlotte had the job. It paid considerably more than her old one, and it required longer hours at the office. It was actually a very good thing that Liam was available to pick up the slack with Chloe and other stuff around the house.

Better yet, the entire episode seemed to have soothed something in Charlotte, some sense of bitterness or injustice that had been holding her apart from Lizzy for a while now. Lizzy wondered whether it was just that Charlotte had been on her way down while Lizzy was on her way up, and now that had changed. Or maybe it was that she had finally seen that, in spite of everything that had changed in her life, Lizzy was still her oldest friend who would do anything for her. They had their ups and downs after that, and they always argued over who would pick up the tab when they went out, but Charlotte did seem to have let go of her resentment about Lizzy's money.

The day after Charlotte started work, Lizzy finally had the nerve to tell her about Will's decision to stay home on Fridays with Emma.

"Weird, huh? Our guys are both home with the kids at the same time," Lizzy said over the phone.

Charlotte laughed. "I wouldn't have expected that of Will before, but I guess I can see it now."

"We heard about this Daddy and Me group. Do you think Liam would like that? I think Will is considering going."

Charlotte snickered, "Can you imagine those two guys hanging out together? Mutt and Jeff."

"Abbott and Costello and strollers. Ha!"

* * *

The following weekend, Richard and Eleanor were in town again. Eleanor came to the apartment on Saturday morning to visit with Lizzy and Emma while the men went off to the club to play squash. The two grown women and one baby woman hiked to the deli around the corner to pick up the fixings for a brunch of bagels and lox before settling down in the living room to play.

Eleanor had just finished telling Lizzy a long, involved and oddly riveting story about a certain holier-than-thou congressman, a chandelier, and a dominatrix dressed as Bo Peep when the men came back to the apartment. As Lizzy wiped the tears of laughter off her cheeks with the back of her hand, she noticed that Will was favoring his left knee a little bit. He brushed it off when she mentioned something about it. So grumpy! She looked at Richard for some help, and saw that he looked a little off, too, although it was harder to read him because of his permanently jovial expression.

"Tough match? Everything OK? " Lizzy asked, concerned, sitting up. She and Eleanor and Emma were sprawled out on the living room carpet fooling around with some wooden puzzles, which Emma was chewing on.

"Oh, just that little shit, Chip Swales," Will muttered.

Lizzy didn't think she'd ever heard Will say that about anyone all the time she'd known him, not even Chip, who truly was an asshole. He was a smug, preening jerk, especially on the squash court. Lizzy had briefly worked with him at DeWitt, and she knew he had a vicious streak, too. She looked between Will and Richard.

"What did he do? Did he say 'neener-neener' when he won, like that other time?" Chip was famous for being a bad sport. Will always tried to avoid playing against him, but sometimes it was inevitable.

Will turned away and set his gym bag down on the floor with a thump. He never did that, either. He always took his bag right back into the bedroom. Instead, he stood there looking torn over whether to speak. Lizzy guessed that he wanted to tell her, but didn't want to repeat what Chip had said because it was too crude and that kind of language never passed his lips. Or maybe it was because he just wanted to shield her from nasty things in general. Richard, though, as usual had no qualms about speaking.

"That guy is such a jackass. We were changing, and he walked up and started giving Will a hard time about, you know, the Fridays thing. He claimed it was all in good fun, just locker room talk, but it was pretty bad."

Now Lizzy was really alarmed.

"What the hell did that jerk say?" Lizzy jumped to her feet and went to stand by Will, whose expression was becoming even more thunderous by the minute.

Richard looked at Will as if asking for permission. Will muttered something under his breath but didn't seem to object, so his cousin went on very matter-of-factly.

"He said a lot of things, but the highlights were 'balls on a necklace around your wife's neck' and 'pussy-whipped.'"

Eleanor murmured, "God, I hate that expression."

Visions of naked guys strutting back and forth in the locker room trying to intimidate each other by swinging their dicks around flashed before Lizzy's eyes.

"So what did you do?" Lizzy demanded, looking at Will.

Will answered stiffly, "I told him that if he thought there was something wrong with a man taking care of his child, or if he thought there was something wrong with a husband and a wife being equals, or if he thought a man had to dominate women all the time like he does his wife, then he'd better get his head examined." He was so angry he was shaking by now.

Richard leaned toward Lizzy and confided, "Actually, I believe Will's exact words at the end there were, 'fuck off and grow the hell up.'"

This was big. She'd never heard Will say anything like that. Never, not even close.

Lizzy put her arms around Will's waist and leaned against his side. He put his arm around her shoulders. "I'm so sorry, sweetheart." She knew how much he hated confrontations, and rude people, and making a scene. And now, apparently, Chip Swales. "That guy is an ass. He always has been, you know that. Just ignore him."

Between gritted teeth, Will said, "I knew there were guys who would think that kind of thing, but I just didn't think any of them would actually say it to my face."

And Lizzy realized that people probably _didn't _normally say awful things right to Will's face because of who he was and what he might be able to do for them. He was a big man, he did manly things, and he'd probably never had his masculinity challenged this directly before. This must be quite a shock, then.

Wryly, Richard commented, "Well, I don't think anyone else will have the nerve to do it again after today. Everybody knows what an adolescent dipshit that guy is. Just try to shake it off."

Sympathetically, Lizzy said, "Plus, I bet he has a teeny, tiny little needle-dick, right? So there's really no competition there, stud." She patted Will's arm reassuringly and did her very best to gaze demurely up at him. "Will's hung like a bull elephant, you know, dear," she stage-whispered to Eleanor, and batted her eyes at Will.

Blithely, Eleanor replied, "Oh, right, that's what I hear," as she looked pointedly at Richard to indicate the supposed source of her information.

Richard gave a great shout of laughter and even Will cracked a smile. "You really know how to build a man up, little lady," Richard said to Lizzy in his best John Wayne voice.

Later, they sat around the dining room table and enjoyed the spread: lox, bagels, cream cheese, capers, onions, tomatoes, the whole works.

Between chewy bites, Richard turned his head to Will, "So, Georgie's getting out soon, right?"

Will nodded. "Uh-huh. Next week." He put some bananas and cheese cubes on Emma's high-chair tray.

"What's the plan?"

"She's moving into an apartment in the city with Blake. It belongs to his family. She can have access to some more of the funds from the family trust if she stays clean and stays in therapy."

"What's she want the money for?" Richard asked, applying some more lox slices to his bagel.

Will shrugged. "I don't know exactly. Maybe for their wedding, or a summer place, or something. I don't even want to know the details, to tell you the truth."

Richard nodded sympathetically. "I'm sorry, man. I wish I could have come to more of the family therapy sessions. I couldn't get away. Sean had me working like a dog on the Hill this spring."

"You came often enough to know they weren't doing much good." Will assumed the glum expression that came over him when he talked about Georgie.

Richard leaned over to pick up some of Emma's cheese that had ended up on the floor. "Yeah. Look, I told my mom and dad that Georgie might be back in the city. They want to have some kind of, you know, family get-together for her. They want you to come, of course."

Will jerked back as if he'd been slapped.

"I know. No excuses from me. You don't have to go if you don't want to. I laid down the law with them, no booze. That's not how you welcome someone back from rehab."

Will just shook his head in disbelief.

Lizzy turned to Eleanor and said brightly, "So, what are you guys doing for the rest of the weekend?"

Later, Lizzy and Will closed the door behind Richard and Eleanor with promises of getting together again soon.

Hitching Emma up on her hip, Lizzy turned to Will and said, "Well, that was ten different kinds of crap to get dumped on you in one day. Are you OK?"

They walked back into the living room and sat down close together on the sofa. Lizzy handed Emma over to Will, who was looking bereft.

"Yeah, I guess. I just can't believe the nerve of Richard's parents. I mean, really? After ten years, they finally decide they want to patch things up, and only after Georgie comes back as the prodigal daughter? Christ."

Emma looked like she was slowing down for her afternoon nap, so Will hoisted her up onto his shoulder and rubbed her back.

"What exactly happened with them?" Lizzy asked hesitantly. He had never shared the details of this story with her before. She had sometimes hoped that maybe he could reconnect with them, become part of the extended family again. Would that ever be possible?

"We had a big showdown after Georgie OD'd. You know this part, the lawyers and counselors told me the research showed the best thing to do was to tell her she was cut off except for her allowance until she agreed to go into rehab. My uncle thought I was taking too hard a line with her, that I should show her some more compassion because she was so young, blah blah blah. He really let me have it. You know, if he admits _anybody _has a problem with booze or whatever, then he has to recognize his _own _problem. And this was after they were no help at all while she was in the hospital and I had to deal with the press and all that crap on my own. I really wasn't in the mood to see them after that."

"Yeah, I can see why. I didn't really know how deep this ran before." Lizzy put her arms around Will and Emma, who was starting to drift off in Will's embrace.

"For what it's worth, I think you're doing the right things, have done the right things, with Georgie. And with Emma, too," she said, alluding to the confrontation with Chip earlier in the day. "It just sucks that it's so hard."

"I couldn't do it without you."

They sat there for a few moments in silence.

"Are you OK with the incident this morning, with that asshat, Chip?"

"Yeah," he said. "If someone like him doesn't like how I'm spending my time, then I'm going to do it twice as hard for twice as long. 'I just get braver when someone tries to intimidate me,' or whatever that saying is."

Lizzy laughed. "Or something like that." She definitely appreciated the sentiment.

* * *

Georgie did leave Tranquility the next week, and she moved into the apartment with Blake. Sunday evening she gave Will a brief courtesy phone call as the counselors had encouraged her to do, and Monday she dutifully took a drug test as the lawyers required. The second weekend she was at home, Will's aunt and uncle had a family get-together at their house on Saturday afternoon.

Lizzy, Will and Emma arrived at the Fitzwilliam house, a nineteenth-century French-style mansion on Park Avenue, to find that the party was already in full swing. They were ushered into what was clearly the ballroom, with its big open spaces, glass doors open to the garden, and a wall of mirrors. The "family" in a small family get-together apparently included several generations of the Fitzwilliam cousins, close to 40 in all if you counted the spouses. And it was most definitely a cocktail party.

Will's uncle met them at the doorway. He was in his early seventies, a tall man like Will, but much heavier, with salt-and-pepper hair and a bulbous, veined, red nose. Like his son Sean, he had been a member of Congress, but he'd retired because of some health problems. Based on his current level of inebriation, Lizzy speculated that they might be related to the state of his liver.

"There you are, Willie. Is this the wife?" Lizzy couldn't believe those were his first words to Will after ten years.

A muscle in Will's cheek twitched a little, but he kept it together. "Lizzy, this is my uncle, Donald Fitzwilliam. Uncle Donald, this is my wife, Elizabeth Bennet, and our daughter, Emma." He was holding Emma, who started to squirm in his unconsciously tightening grip.

Lizzy stuck out her hand, and Uncle Donald took it, giving her the once-over. Staring right at her chest, he boomed, "Well, it's quite a pleasure to meet such a fine-looking young lady." Perhaps Will was not the only boob-man in the family.

A painfully thin woman in her mid-sixties came over to join them. She gave them a big, horsey smile. "Hello, Will dear," she said as she reached up to kiss him on the cheek. Her hand on his shoulder trembled visibly. "It's been such a long time. This must be Lizzy and Emma. I'm Will's Aunt Doris. We're so pleased you could come today. Please, come in and meet the others."

And so, with a glass of wine that she couldn't drink pressed into her hand, Lizzy did meet them all. She and Will successfully ran the gauntlet, saying hello to Trixie the paparazzi darling; to Lana, the face of Chancôme; to her husband Hans, the former pro wrestler and recently impeached governor of a state far to the west; and to Congressman Sean and his wife, among many others.

Coming up for air after the last of the introductions, Lizzy was relieved to discover that Richard and Eleanor had arrived. At last, a familiar, friendly face! Will had retreated into stony silence and was no help at all, but he did loosen up a little once in Richard and Eleanor's literally and figuratively warm embrace. Lizzy put her untouched wineglass on a passing waiter's tray and asked if she could please have a ginger ale.

"Damn it," muttered Richard. "I _told _him no booze. The old man doesn't listen to a word I say."

Georgie and Blake arrived shortly after. Uncle Donald crowed, "Aha! The woman of the hour! Welcome back, Georgie my love!" And he gave her a big kiss on the cheek, and enthusiastically shook Blake's hand. This was the first time Lizzy had seen Blake, whose bleached blonde hair and dark tan made him look as though he'd probably just stowed his surfboard at the front door.

Lizzy turned and looked at Will with eyes full of questions. He shrugged. "He skis all winter and surfs and sails all summer."

From across the room, Lizzy saw Uncle Donald hand Georgie a glass of Chardonnay, trumpeting "What the hell, it's only white wine! It's practically water." Georgie took the glass tentatively, clearly conflicted about what she should do with it.

Will turned away and muttered, "Crap, here we go again."

Richard headed over to see what he could do to remedy the situation.

Lizzy asked Will, "Do you want to go over there and help him out?"

"No, I can't. The counselors want me to let her make her own decisions. She thinks I've already been too directive with her, and they agreed."

They heard Trixie trill, "Oh my God, did I tell you who I, like, _met _at rehab in Malibu?"

They heard Lana, pointing to her eyes, say, "Thank you, I think they turned out really well, too. I was going to wait till next winter, but Chancôme told me I had to do it now or they'd cancel my contract."

Across the room, Hans was recounting to Uncle Donald, "And I said to the detective, so what if I'm porking the housekeeper. Wouldn't you? Look at her!" Uncle Donald hooted with laughter.

Lizzy moved even closer to Will, who clutched Emma so tightly that she gave a little squeal.

"I'm sorry," he murmured to Lizzy, "I just couldn't believe it would be this bad."

Eventually Georgie and Blake made their way to the corner where Will, Lizzy and Eleanor stood. Richard had evidently failed in his efforts to take possession of the glass of white wine, because Georgie was still holding it a little away from her body as if it were a snake that might bite her. Blake was making a big production of sipping on a glass of club soda. Everyone said hello, and they stood talking for a minute about Georgie and Blake's new apartment. Georgie mentioned that they were probably going to get married in a few weeks in a civil ceremony at City Hall—no guests.

Uncle Donald came over to them, scotch and soda in hand and Richard on his tail. He had overheard the news, and offered a toast to the happy couple. When Georgie didn't raise her glass to her lips, he nudged her with his elbow. "Go on, drink up! Where's the harm in a little wine? Anyway, it's bad luck not to drink when someone makes a toast."

"Dad! No!" Richard barked. Donald ignored him.

Georgie looked at Blake, and blinked her long giraffe-fairy lashes a few times before saying, "Well, I guess one sip won't hurt, right? I think I can handle it. I'm a big girl."

"Better not, honey," said Blake, just as she took a sip.

Will observed all of this unfold in silence. Lizzy could see that he was just barely restraining himself from saying something, though.

A few minutes later, Will pulled Lizzy aside. "We have to get out of here. Can you think of some excuse with Emma?" He seemed desperate.

"Yeah, sure. Uh, we could say her reflux is acting up and we have to get her home to take some medicine, maybe?" Actually she had no idea whether that made any sense, and Emma didn't have reflux, but she didn't really care.

They hastily made their excuses, got Emma's carseat and diaper bag from the butler, and hailed a cab.

"Did you see how he did that?" Will raged once they were settled in the cab. "Did you see how he undermined her weeks of rehab right there? You just saw the end of her sobriety right there. _Right there_."

"OK, sweetie, calm down. Is it as serious as that? I'm only asking, because I don't know."

"Yes, it's as serious as that. We talked about it in family therapy a million times. Georgie can't drink any alcohol, _ever_, because she doesn't know how to stop once she gets started. She's an addict. She knows that about herself. I couldn't say anything. I had to let her make her own choice. God!"

He raged and stormed all the way home. When they were finally back in the apartment, he said, "OK, that's it. I'm not seeing them again, ever. Never again. I don't need that in my life."

"Your aunt and uncle, you mean?"

"Yes. And Georgie's so far gone she can't even try anymore. That's it. I'm not going to be involved in her drama. She can talk to the lawyers directly from now on. I'm out. Time for me to live my own life, take care of my own family. Richard and Eleanor are the only Fitzwilliams I ever want to see again."

Lizzy thought that maybe this was going a little far, but on the other hand she hadn't been there through the years and years of struggle that had come before. And anyway, the only thing that really mattered here was that Will had reached his breaking point. That was good enough for her.

"OK. You have my full support, no matter what."

She got him out of his fancy clothes and into sweatpants and a t-shirt. They huddled with Emma on the sofa in the darkened entertainment room in front of the TV, eating microwave popcorn, frozen macaroni and cheese, and ice cream for the rest of the evening and most of the night. She even let him decide what they would watch. That was why instead of something decent like the films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, they saw every single one of the increasingly awful James Bond movies starring the oh-so-wooden Roger Moore as 007.

Now _that _was true love.

* * *

_If your courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate you, please tell me about it just below.  
_


	16. Chapter 16

_A/N: Many, many thanks to Jan for her friendship, support, and application of high standards during the writing of this story. Thanks to Alison for great feedback and for helping me stay true to my principles. And, finally, deepest thanks and appreciation to Barbara, who stuck with this project through trying times of her own. This one is dedicated to you, dear friend._

* * *

**Chapter 16**

**Summer 2013 **

Once Will had decided to walk away from the situation with Georgie, he seemed much more at peace with himself and his life, as if a heavy burden had been lifted from his shoulders. When Georgie called for her obligatory Sunday check-in the day after the Fitzwilliam family party, he gently and kindly told her that he was removing himself from the business of administering her trust fund, and that from now on she should talk directly and exclusively to the lawyers about it. She was an adult, almost 30 years old, and she could make her own decisions now. He told her he didn't expect her to check in with him if she didn't want to, and he hoped she and Blake would be very happy together. She accepted all this with some relief, it seemed. And Will, too, was very relieved that it was all over.

"I already mourned her for a long time. That sweet little kid has been gone for years. There's nothing to mourn anymore. All that's left of her is the disease," he said.

So he moved on, and let her go. After that he rarely saw Georgie or heard from her, and mostly just caught glimpses of her life in the newspaper or in bits and pieces of stories that Richard passed on. She and Blake got married. Before long, they both went back into rehab. They got out and started a charity to help people with addictions. She went back into rehab. Rinse and repeat. It was a train wreck, but at least Will was watching from a safe distance and not standing on the track watching the bright light bearing down on him. Yet it still had the power to make him sad when each bit of grim news trickled in.

Now he threw himself with great joy and determination into his time alone with Emma, and into their time together as a family. On weekends, they went to the beach at a club on Long Island, or to a friend's place in the Hamptons, or out to Westchester to see Charlie and Jane and the boys. They went to Netherfield one long weekend and he never complained about the bad cellphone service or about needing to get work done, not even once.

At the same time, Lizzy knew Will was working very hard at the office, too. He told her the reorganization had gone well, and said it was a good thing he had offloaded some of his unnecessary duties so he could concentrate on the higher-level matters that truly were the business of a CEO. He was relieved that Ahmed was back from parental leave and running his schedule and work-life like clockwork again. Nobody had complained—at least not openly—that Will was unavailable on Fridays.

One day in June Will forwarded an email to Lizzy while she was at home with Emma. It was from Charlie, who had gotten it from Caroline, who had somehow found it on a trashy New York tabloid website. Buried in a gossip column, the story read:

_Word on the street is that William Darcy has stepped back from his top position at WPD to 'spend more time with his family.' As we all know, that's usually a cover for something serious—drugs? alcohol? mental health issues? sex addiction? There were rumors of drug use by this apparently upstanding citizen ten years ago, when his younger sister Georgiana reportedly overdosed on cocaine. What's the real story here?_

Lizzy immediately called him back to find out how he was taking it, worried about who might have felt the need to share this information with a gossip rag in the first place. Probably Chip freaking Swales or someone like that. Unless it was Caroline, herself...Hmmm. Could she really be that jealous after all this time?

"Well," said Will, "at least we aren't a publicly traded company. Our stock definitely would have tanked after this."

"Oh God, Will, I'm sorry. Are the lawyers going after the paper?"

"No, no. It was all innuendo, so we can't sue them for libel. I think we just have to fight back with some good publicity. I'm going to talk to our PR person and see if we can put a piece out there about the new policies. Maybe in the WSJ or something."(1)

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," he said emphatically. "Nothing is ever going to change until more of us are brave enough to put up with this kind of crap and still keep on going."

"You mean more men?"

"Yeah."

He would never stop surprising her, it seemed.

* * *

It took a few weeks for him to decide he really wanted to do it, but eventually Will did try going to a Daddy and Me meet-up with Liam and Chloe one Friday. The dads and kids all met at the Union Square Wonderland, a playground that was supposed to be innovative and fantastic for kids of all ages.

"So how was it?" Lizzy asked that evening. Will and Emma hadn't been home when she'd first returned from the library, so she figured things couldn't have gone too badly. Now they were changing Emma's diaper and getting her into some clean clothes

"The playground is really cool. Had a great sandbox. I can see going back there a lot. There will be lots of new things for her to try as she gets older." He held out his hand for a wipe.

"And the dads? Was that OK?"

"Yeah, sure."

"What did you do? Did you sit in a drum circle and talk about masculinity or something?" she teased, and handed him a clean diaper.

He chuckled. "No. But I have to admit that I've never stood around with a group of guys talking about Huggies vs. Pampers before."

"So were they a bunch of slackers?" This was of course what he'd originally thought they would be like.

"No, of course not. Obviously I didn't talk to everyone, but one guy said he'd lost his job on Wall Street in the crash and then decided not to go back because his wife travels a lot for work and it was hard with the kids. Another guy mentioned that he and his wife had decided he would stay home with the kid because his wife made more money. You know, I respect that. It's a rational economic decision." Will snapped up Emma's romper and handed her over to Lizzy so he could go wash his hands.

Lizzy took Emma and glared at him. "You're kidding, right? Because this isn't all about economics. Obviously it's not, since you took a pay cut to stay home with Emma."

Will smirked back at her. "Ah, but I'm also optimizing my happiness levels, which is one form of utility maximization."

Lizzy pursed her lips and then burst out laughing. "Sure, OK, if it makes you feel better to think about it that way."

He held his dirty hands off to the side and leaned over to nuzzle Emma's fuzzy head. "Also, I love my little snoogie-woogie baby lamb chop," he said in that funny high voice that people use when they're talking to babies.

Lizzy laughed even more and said, "Oh, go wash your hands, you old softie."

* * *

Lizzy had a great summer, too. She felt like this arrangement hit the sweet spot for her, at least at this moment in her life. She had a lot of time alone with Emma, and weekends and evenings with Emma and Will. But she also got to spend two whole days a week immersing herself in and writing about the law, working on her law review article, blogging about her ideas, and also thinking through the place of her arguments in the course she'd be teaching come September and in the larger context of national security law. She felt her mind come back alive, and as someone for whom the life of the mind had always been critical, that was totally exhilarating.

Donna and the rest of the board at Bella's Place had submitted a great proposal to the Fitzwilliam-Darcy Trust, and Lizzy and Will had decided to move forward with a $20 million donation. It took a lot of time to work out all the details, but by the end of the summer the Trust and Bella's Place had started working together on several different aspects of the plan. Most importantly, they had bought a building near the original Bella's Place site and were gutting it in order to create transitional apartments for women and children who were ready to leave the shelter but didn't have another stable place to live yet. Next, they were working on setting up a network of existing small women's shelters around the city so that they could pool the resources they already had. They established permanent ties between that new network and the one the Trust had already set up for drug treatment and support for at-risk teens, so that the women would have access to treatment, too. They were looking into some existing job-training programs, as well, and seeing if they could make it all come together in an integrated path back to a stable, prosperous life for the women and children who came through Bella's Place. And finally, they started a new outreach effort to raise more money for the whole enterprise from individual donors, corporations, and matching grants from the city and the state. (2)

It was such a big project that it alone could have taken all of Lizzy's time if she had decided to take it on. But as much as she liked and cared deeply about the it, the law was her first professional love. So they hired new staff at the Trust to do the heavy lifting.

Emma was doing great. She loved Elena, who delighted in her just as much. Lizzy had taken a photo of the two of them facing each other playing pattycake. Their eyes were wide in surprise and excitement, their mouths matching O's, their hands just touching. Lizzy framed it and put it on the mantel next to the other family photos, along with a more formal photo of Emma sitting in Elena's lap.

Emma also seemed more attached to Will than ever because of their time together. She had always liked to sit with him, but now she reached for him more, and turned to him some of the time when she needed help or comfort. Maybe Lizzy felt a tiny twinge of jealousy when she saw that. But even more powerful was joy in the knowledge that this was exactly what Will needed right now, and what Emma needed, too. These hours together now, these touches, caresses and kisses, tears wiped away and, yes, even diapers changed, would create a bond that would help them navigate the shoals and dangerous rapids of childhood and adolescence with a minimum of serious damage. She was sure of it. And it seemed to her that he could finally see it now, too.

They decided to take a vacation in July. It couldn't be an adventure vacation or one in a faraway place like the ones they'd taken when it was just Lizzy and Will. For one thing, Emma still hated her car seat and moving vehicles in general, so a long plane ride sounded like a spectacularly bad idea.

Lizzy asked Will, "Want to see if Jane and Charlie are going to be at Netherfield for the Fourth? Maybe we could meet them up there if they are."

"Or, I could call my Great Aunt Myrtle and ask her if we can have the Darcy family cottage on the Cape."

"What? Why have I never heard of this before?"

Will shrugged. "I don't know. Because you always wanted to climb Mount Everest or something for vacations. Anyway, I'm not close with her, but somehow she ended up with my great-grandfather's beach house, and she always let my parents use it. She had to let them, according to the will, I think. Or, I guess we could just buy a place of our own on the Cape."

"Uhhhhhh," said Lizzy, still a little bowled over by this kind of talk.

In any case, by the end of July they had bought a new beach house on Cape Cod and were able to spend a week there. They were whisked in and out by the corporate jet so that Emma had hardly enough time to work up to a good wail by the time they landed.

One sunny afternoon that week while they were enjoying sitting on the back porch overlooking the water, Lizzy and Will watched incredulously while Emma took her first three unsteady steps on her own at age nine months, 21 days. Let the games begin!, thought Lizzy. And let the next stage of rigorous babyproofing begin, too.

And just like the more adventurous vacations from earlier in their marriage, this vacation produced photos that ended up on the wall in the foyer of the apartment. Only instead of Mt. Kilimanjaro or Versailles, these photos featured a sun-bonneted Emma with Will and Lizzy, sitting on the windy beach, laughing, entwined, enraptured.

* * *

Once Will had essentially let go of his family by birth, he seemed much more interested in expanding their circle of family-type friends. So he made an effort to reach out to some of the men he knew and liked at the club, people like Stephen and his wife Valerie, Hal and his wife Carla. He and Lizzy had occasionally had dinner with both these couples before Emma, but now they started having weekend brunches with them and their kids instead. From Lizzy's point of view, they weren't the most scintillating intellectual company, but they were really good people: fun, kind and generous to each other and their children, and on the same wavelength as Lizzy and Will about a lot of parenting issues. All of that was worth a whole lot.

They still saw Charlotte, Liam and Chloe often over bagels on Sundays. Charlotte was thriving in her new job, and Liam seemed to be pretty happy with their situation, too. He had never liked anything about retail except for the paycheck, but he did like hanging around with Chloe. He was teaching her how to bang on stuff with hammers and they had planted a great garden in their half of the backyard. In fact, he and Chloe were enjoying themselves so much that they decided she would only go to preschool for three half-days a week beginning in the fall, even though they could afford full-time care now.

Charlotte and Lizzy never quite completely resumed the easy rapport of their early years, because life wasn't like that. But Lizzy tried very hard to think before she spoke about money-related things, and Charlotte tried just as hard to accept Lizzy's situation in life and not get pissed off about the unfairness of it all. At the end of the summer, Charlotte, Liam and Chloe joined Lizzy and family at the beach house on the Cape for Labor Day weekend. They all flew up together, dug for clams, ate fish and chips, swam in the ocean, and didn't talk about the size of the house or the plane or money even once. It was a promising start to the latest chapter in Lizzy and Charlotte's life-long friendship.

* * *

In early August, Lizzy decided to take the plunge and apply for faculty positions at law schools. This wasn't the kind of thing where you could just call your contacts and get a job, which was what happened for practicing lawyers. There was a _process_. She registered with the job service at the Association of American Law Schools, wrote up the best résumé and cover letter she could, and threw them in the proverbial hopper, hoping for the best. If any of the schools were interested, they would contact her before the AALS faculty recruitment conference in the middle of October. And if they were, she'd go down to Washington for face-to-face interviews there.

By the middle of August, Lizzy had finished her article and posted it on SSRN to see if she'd get any feedback from the readers at the Legal Scholars Network. She was pleased with the constructive criticism it received and felt intensely gratified as the number of downloads shot up. A few weeks later she finished polishing the article and submitted it to the Harvard Law Review, where, with some additional revisions, it was accepted for publication. The months of hard work had paid off.

* * *

The second week in September, Lizzy's class at Yale met for the first time. She took the Acela up to New Haven first thing in the morning, and sat in the faculty lounge twiddling her thumbs and nervously revising her opening remarks over and over until it was finally 1 o'clock. She took a deep breath as she opened the door to a seminar room that she knew very well from her years as a student. The walls were still lined with bookshelves full of legal treatises; the familiar scent of musty old books, leather upholstery, and furniture polish sent her back in time. Fifteen eager faces looked up at her from around the dark, oval-shaped seminar table. In them, she saw reflections of her own self fifteen years ago: the bright eyes, the self-assured smiles, the hands ready to shoot up into the air before the question was even asked. She grinned right back at them. This was going to be good. She could _so _do this.

* * *

In early October, the day after Emma's first birthday party, Lizzy heard back from eleven law schools that were interested in interviewing her. She was so excited! Unfortunately, eight of them were far, far from the greater New York area. One of the remaining three was one she'd only dared hope for in her wildest dreams: Columbia Law School. Also on the list were NYU and Fordham. She had no idea what her chances were at these places, but she was determined to do her very best. She called Prof. Hoffman and Dean Goodwin for advice, and asked whether she should even do the interviews with far-away places if she didn't intend to accept jobs there. They advised her to do them as practice, before the interviews with the New York schools. She scoured the Internet for advice from different law schools on how to have a good interview. Based on all of this, she worked hard to lay out a plan for the legal scholarship she was likely to do in the coming years. She knew that was what they'd ask her about.

In mid-October, Lizzy, Emma, Will and Elena all boarded the WPD jet for a two-day, two-night trip to Washington. Will had said at first that he couldn't possibly take two days off in the middle of the week. Later, he had managed to find a way to make it work because he had realized he didn't want to miss it.

Lizzy found herself in the odd position of sitting on hotel beds being interviewed in 30-minute increments by quirky legal scholars who asked about her experience, her commitment to academia, and, most importantly, her anticipated scholarly trajectory. Since the interviews all proceeded in the same way, she figured out what she was supposed to do by the third or fourth one, and was able to kick it into high gear by the time she had the Columbia, Fordham and NYU interviews. In between meetings, she met her posse in the lobby, where Elena and Will took turns holding Emma up to watch the waterfall and chasing her around the dangerously sharp-edged furniture.

After that she was invited to on-campus interviews at seven schools, and decided only to undergo the process at the two in New York, Columbia and NYU. It was a risky strategy, and Will suggested maybe she do the Stanford interview just in case. But Lizzy felt she couldn't in good conscience visit schools she knew she couldn't accept a job offer from. Both interviews went well, each lasting an exhausting day and a half, and she had high hopes, especially for her alma mater.

Unfortunately, in the end, Lizzy didn't land the Columbia position. It was a disappointment. A hot new JD-slash-PhD from Harvard got the job. But she did get the job at NYU, which was also a top-five law school. And when she thought about how lucky she was to have a position in the city where she needed to be, and when she thought about the life she'd be able to continue having, she could hardly believe her good fortune.

When she told her women lawyers support group about it, they congratulated her warmly.

"Great!" said Janice. "Finally, we have an academic in our little group. That's what we've been needing all along."

"I envy the flexibility, but I think I'd miss the excitement of the courtroom," Vanessa commented. "You know, the big thrill, putting it all on the line." The other women nodded.

"Oh, you can get quite an adrenaline rush if you go into class totally unprepared," chuckled Lizzy. "Or so I hear. Not that I would ever do _anything _like that myself."

As they were all leaving the restaurant, Lizzy, with Emma on her hip, put her arm around Paula's shoulders. "See, I told you I'd find a way to make it work."

Paula patted Lizzy's shoulder right back. "I know. I'm really sorry about what I said before. I know you all, the younger generation, will find your own path, in ways I can't even imagine. I'm constantly amazed, so proud of you and what you've all accomplished."

Lizzy's heart warmed. "And we thank you for everything you've done to make it possible. None of us would be here now if you hadn't been in there before us, kicking ass and taking names."

Paula smiled contentedly back at her. "Yeah, we did that, didn't we? Hmmm."

* * *

At Thanksgiving, Lizzy, Will and Emma made another trip to Artemis to see Tom and Lillian. This visit was much better planned than the last, and so they were able to rent a car and stay at a hotel the whole time. Jane, Charlie and the boys stayed at the hotel, too, as did Lydia and Susanna. Tom's health was failing, and so everyone made the trip this year. It was a little tense at first when Lydia and Tom faced off for the first time since her OD. Before long, though, she and Will were sitting in a corner of the living room making each other laugh with their acerbic observations. Mary and Kevin even managed to stick it out until dessert before they escaped in their RV back to Rochester.

Because of his worsening heart trouble, Tom was struggling to get up the stairs to the bedroom, so he'd started sleeping on a cot in his study on the first floor. Somehow he was still getting to class, but nobody could imagine that happening for much longer. The garden was a mess because Lillian wasn't able to maintain it anymore, and the house didn't look too great, either. Everyone had the feeling this might be Lillian's last big Thanksgiving, because it was just getting to be too much for her. The day after Thanksgiving, Jane and Lizzy called Aunt Maddie to ask for her advice, and she hooked them up with a geriatric-care manager in Artemis. She was able to fill them in on the kinds of elder care that were available in the area.

For weeks after that, Jane and Lizzy argued with Tom and Lillian by phone about whether they needed more help if they were going to stay in the house. Finally Tom collapsed in class the first week of the spring semester and Lillian crashed the Volvo rushing to the hospital to see him. At last everyone had to face up to the fact that Tom needed to retire and get some medical attention. By March, Lillian and Tom had sold their house and moved into a cottage in a retirement community with graduated levels of care. It was populated mostly by former Artemis College professors and their spouses. There was a community garden and a well-stocked art studio for Lillian to enjoy, and Tom gleefully joined a literature and philosophy reading group that gave him a weekly opportunity to shout mocking epithets at his old colleagues between breaths of oxygen from the tank strapped to his walker. It was super-expensive and Lizzy and Will paid for it all, but Lillian and Tom thought it was covered by Medicare. As if.

That spring, Lizzy taught another class at Yale. She had done a good job the previous fall, and so Dean Goodwin asked her to teach a more general class on human rights law. The class whetted her appetite for more, and she threw herself into getting ready to teach at NYU in September.

* * *

In March of 2014, Louisa had a big party to celebrate the publication of her new book, _The Shallow End_. It was a comic novel about an Upper East Side socialite, Kiki Smythington-Cates, and her best friend Tootie Riverford, as they embarked together on a doomed business venture designing and installing themed luxury spas into all their friends' homes. Besides descending into the living hell of having to do things for themselves occasionally, Kiki and Tootie also learned a little too much about the preferences and proclivities of their friends and their friends' husbands and all their respective lovers. There were only so many Star Trek, Hello Kitty, and _Shades of Grey_ crossover spa rooms that a woman and her business partner could design before boredom set in, after all. Louisa had given Lizzy an advance copy to read, and Lizzy thought it was pretty great. Kiki and Tootie reminded her of Patsy and Edina in "Absolutely Fabulous," only without the restraint and good taste.

The afternoon party was at Louisa and Gil's house, which Will had never seen before. Lizzy had warned him about the mural in the dining room, but apparently he hadn't really believed her. He stood staring at it with horrified fascination for about a minute before finally turning to her in consternation and stalking out of the room shielding Emma's eyes. To a packed living room, Gil performed a Beat-style poem he'd written as a tribute to Louisa. It had a bongo accompaniment and it was damn good. Then Gil led everyone, in his scratchy Winnie-the-Pooh voice, in a sparkling apple cider toast to Louisa.

After that, Louisa and her friend Tina did a dramatic reading of one of the crucial scenes in the book. Lizzy laughed until tears ran down her face. At first Will, who hadn't read the book, watched and listened with one eyebrow raised in alarm, but eventually he got the joke and cackled along with everyone else. All the kids playing in the corner looked up when Louisa shrieked, "I don't care what you think, Kitty-Spock is _not _getting a nozzle _there_," but went back to their own business when it quickly became clear there was nothing for them to see.

Caroline and her husband Hollis—it turned out his name wasn't Dudley, after all— came to the party, too. They had left their son, Jaden, at home with the nanny in spite of the fact that the invitation had clearly said there would be magic tricks and a live animal show for kids. They stood uncomfortably by themselves in the corner watching the wacky goings-on. Charlie and Jane drifted over to say hello, pulling Lizzy and Will with them.

After they'd exchanged greetings, Caroline said, "Wasn't that reading _nice_? I'm really happy for Louisa. But, confidentially," she whispered, "I don't think she really understands, uh, that social MILL-you, if you know what I mean."

"Hmm," Lizzy hummed noncommittally. She knew that Louisa had based the character of Kiki on Caroline, and in Lizzy's opinion she'd totally nailed it.

"Well, I think it was wonderful. _So _funny," Jane piped in, "maybe a little exaggerated, but some artistic license is OK, right?"

Charlie chortled, "Oh my God, I thought I was going to bust a gut when the rubber hose—."

Jane cut him off with a big smile, saying, "Little pitchers have big ears," as Aiden came over to pull on her arm. "Too much excitement, sweetie? Do you want to go have some quiet time in Jason's room, with the castle and the dragon on the wall?" He nodded yes, so off they went.

Charlie watched them go fondly. "She's so great with him. The Master's program is fantastic, and she says it's giving her a lot of new ways to help him through." Jane was now enrolled at SUNY Westchester in a part-time MA program in special education, focusing on children with autism. "Things are going really well at his new preschool, too. The transition was kind of rough, though."

"Yeah, that's what she told me," Lizzy said sympathetically. "How's Tyler doing with all the change, and all the attention going to Aiden?"

"He's good. He likes his new babysitter, after the disaster with the first one. You know, he was used to being with Jane all the time. And he and I always have special time together on Saturdays so that he gets some undivided love and attention at least once a week."

Will launched into a serious conversation with Charlie about the importance of the father-child bond, so Lizzy sidled over to Caroline, who was apparently so bored by the conversation that she had turned to her silent husband and looked as though she might even speak to him.

Before she had a chance, Lizzy said, "Say, Caroline, thanks for letting Charlie know about that item in the gossip column about Will taking time off to be with Emma. Can you imagine, insinuating he was on drugs? Incredible. How did you find it, anyway? I didn't know you read the tabs."

"Oh, no, I don't. Never." Caroline shook her head in vigorous denial, her chunky gold jewelry clanking as she did.

"Really."

"No," Caroline said innocently. Her eyebrows couldn't get any higher than they already were, but she was doing her best to bat her eyelashes using the few remaining facial muscles that weren't in thrall to Botox.

"I see. Anyway, it all worked out OK. WPD actually got some good publicity out of it in the end. _Working Mom_ magazine named it as one of the top ten places for women _and men_ with families to work in New York."

Caroline looked shocked, "Well that wasn't what I—" She stopped herself before she could go any further.

"Oh, Caroline, I didn't know you still _cared_," Lizzy smiled, "And after all this time, too. Thank you for thinking of us."

Hollis looked confused and Caroline said, "Oh look, honey, there's, uh, someone I know from Pilates," and hustled him off across the room.

Then the live animal show started and Emma toddled over to get a look. All unpleasantness was forgotten in the face of—gasp!—the world's softest living stuffed animal, a chinchilla.

* * *

In October, Emma had her second birthday party. On a rainy Saturday afternoon, kids and parents gathered in the former ballroom, now playroom, at the Darcy-Bennet home for a circus-themed celebration. Will's grandmother probably would have fainted if she'd seen what they had done to the space. Only eleven kids were there: Jane's boys, Charlotte's daughter Chloe, Vanessa's daughter Tory, Louisa's son Jason, Stacy's older child, two girls from the mother's group, and the other children from Louisa's playdate group. But it felt like a million children when they swarmed all over the play structure and jumped on the bouncy castle and rolled on the blue floor mats and pulled out every single musical instrument in the toyboxes while making faces at the mirrors on the walls. There were boo-boos, and tears, and a lot of snot, but everyone settled down when it was time to eat the cake decorated with elephants, lions, and a high-wire act. After they'd eaten, of course, the kids bounced off the walls again. There was a guy making balloon animals over to one side. Lizzy had told the party planner that no scary clowns were allowed under their big top.

Lizzy, Vanessa and Stacy were standing in what passed for a quiet corner of the room, chatting as they watched their kids play, catching up on their lives and talking about what the other members of the women lawyers group had been up to. Audrey had just made partner, and Janice had gotten a new job as chief legal counsel at a big non-profit.

Stacy sighed, "I do sort of miss miss the life sometimes, although not the hours."

Vanessa nodded, "Yeah, it's not easy. I don't know if I could do it with three kids, like you have. One is tough enough."

"Do you think about going back to it, ever?" Lizzy asked Stacy, who looked, if not exactly wistful, then at least thoughtful.

"No, not _per se_," Stacy shook her head. "Not exactly. But I do wonder if I'd be able to get back in if I wanted to. Or had to. Do you remember Megan, from that time we all met at Martha's for brunch? The redhead, Harvard MBA?"

Lizzy sure did. She was the one who'd been so obsessed with her kids getting into the right schools, and extracurriculars and all that.

"Well, I was just talking with her this morning. Four or five months ago, her husband left her for one of the other associates on his consulting team. He told Megan he felt like they didn't have anything in common anymore because all she ever talked about was her volunteer work and 'minor household issues' like, you know, _the kids_."

Vanessa and Lizzy groaned in sympathy. "Jackass." "Jerk."

"Yeah. So now she's got both kids on her own, and she's been looking for a job, but she hasn't been able to find anything full-time because she's been out of the workforce for, I don't know, seven or eight years." Stacy suddenly almost fell over as her toddler rocketed into her leg and then, bam, was off like a shot back across the room.

"Isn't she getting alimony and child support?" asked Vanessa, grabbing Stacy's arm to help her regain her balance.

"Yes, she will, but, you know, she has to think about the longer term, the rest of her life. Oh, God, and trying to go back to work, and raising the kids, and _also _working out visitations and holidays and all that. What a nightmare."

The three women stood looking at their feet, thinking it all through. Stacy was right. It was the "opt-out" mom's absolute worst nightmare.

Lizzy looked up at Stacy, who was chewing on her lip. "That's tough. Really tough. Does it have you worried?"

"Yeah, a little," said Stacy glumly. "Makes you feel really vulnerable. Anything can happen, and this whole perfect life is all over, just like that."

"I know," agreed Lizzy. "I'm really sorry for Megan. That's awful. I can't even imagine trying to go back to work on my own with Emma, without Will around."

Vanessa turned and, in a much lighter tone, asked Lizzy, "Right, so, how's that going now that you're working full time again?"

"It's great!" Lizzy said, following her happier lead. "Trying to figure it all out. It's a new world, totally different from corporate or non-profit. There's still a lot of pressure, just not the same kind. I haven't had to grade anything yet, but so far so good. The students are, you know, a demanding bunch. I'm working on a new law review article. State approached me again about a position in Washington based on that last article I published, but I'm not ready to quit a job I just got. We'll see. Anyway, I feel like I'm back on track. Or, on a good _new _track, maybe."

Vanessa nodded. "And what about, you know, the balance? That was pretty hard for you before, as I recall."

"Yeah, it was. It's better. I take Emma one day a week, Will takes her one day, and our nanny, Elena, has her three days. My time is more flexible, doesn't have to be nine to six or whatever. I do work at night sometimes. But, I don't have to travel if I don't want to, you know, to go to a conference or something. And I'm doing a better job of accepting and asking for help. Elena is super, and we also have backups when we need it. I won't let it get that bad again, no matter what. I feel like we really have it down now."

"That's great. I wish I could get Michael to be so involved." Vanessa nodded across the room at Will, who was lifting Emma up high in the air so she could grab the ribbon dangling from a balloon that had escaped up to the high ceiling.

Stacy nodded in agreement. "Uh-huh, I wish Dave were home more, too."

"Yeah, I never thought Will would do it, either." Lizzy watched Will kiss Emma and put her down on the floor.

"What changed?" Stacy asked curiously, staggering a little again as her toddler bounced off her legs once more and then ran off screaming.

"A lot of things, I think. For both of us, really. Some family...tragedy, I guess you'd call it. You know, re-evaluation of priorities. Some— just growing up. Seeing the bigger picture of life."

Stacy smiled her concurrence. "That's a big one, isn't it? I don't feel like I'll ever really grow up."

"No, neither do I. But here are these little creatures who think we know everything." Lizzy sighed.

Vanessa laughed, "Maybe we'll get a few more years of that, if we're lucky. Then it's back to everyone in the world thinking we're idiots again."

* * *

That evening Will and Lizzy were kneeling next to the tub giving Emma a bath when she told him about her conversation with Vanessa and Stacy.

"Wow, that's rough," Will commented about Megan's situation. "Makes you think twice, doesn't it?"

Lizzy reached for the yellow shampoo bottle. "Uh-huh. Makes me feel glad I'm where I am right now. I mean, I feel terrible for her, and you know, you and I are solid, but still..."

Will splashed some water into Emma's hair, trying to keep her head back so the water didn't go into her eyes. "Yeah, I know. Being able to be independent has always been important to you. I get that."

"Hmm. Anyway, talking to them got me thinking about those first few months, leaving HRI and all of that. God, that was hard. We've come a long way in two years, haven't we?" Lizzy asked as she rubbed shampoo into Emma's hair. Will was now holding a washcloth over the toddler's eyes to keep them dry and bubble-free.

"Yeah. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into."

Lizzy picked up a plastic cup and started to give the hair a rinse. Emma screamed "NO! NO water!" and smacked her hands into the water, splashing it all over everything.

Lizzy looked down at her soaked t-shirt and laughed. "No, not really. But I feel like we kind of have things under control, finally. We've got a routine down. Our disaster management skills are much better than before."

"And our tolerance for noise and chaos of all kinds is also much higher," commented Will drily as Emma screeched and squirted out of his grasp. "That's a useful thing."

"True, true." Lizzy stopped speaking to concentrate on wrangling Emma so they could get the last bit of shampoo out of her hair. Finally meeting with success, Lizzy handed Emma her squeaky rubber ducky and sat back on her heels. She swiped at a few bubbles on her own face with her sleeve, and pushed some hair that had escaped her ponytail away from her twitching nose.

She turned to Will, who was dabbing at his soaked blue buttondown shirt with the washcloth. It wasn't doing any good, of course, because the washcloth was wet, too. He looked up questioningly when he noticed she was watching at him.

She smiled at him, a big open smile full of joy and love. "And it's really good, isn't it?"

He grinned back and reached over to take her wet hand in his. "Yeah. It's really good."

Their perfect, shining moment of happiness didn't last, though. Just then Emma shrieked that she was cold and wanted to get out of the water. Lizzy had to pull her hand away so she could stand up to grab Emma's towel from the warmer next to the tub.

"Well, anyway, it seems like we do pretty much have this whole kid thing down now," Will said as he pulled Emma up out of the bath and handed her to Lizzy, who was waiting with the towel. "Ready to start thinking about baby number two?"

**~The End**~

* * *

_Footnotes:_

(1) WSJ is _The Wall Street Journal._

(2) Bella's Place is, of course, made up, but there is a real organization like this in New York City, a big network that began as a shelter for battered and homeless women. It's called WIN, and it seems completely amazing.

* * *

_That's it! This last chapter is sort of like an epilogue, I think, so there won't be another one. I would like to leave it up to your imagination whether they have a second child or not, and just where Lizzy's career goes. The reason is that all of us, like the characters in the story, have different ideas about what an ideal family is and what constitutes a good life. I have my own thoughts about what happens next, of course, but maybe you can share what you think would be a happily ever after for this family._

_Thanks for reading all the way to the end. I'd love to hear from you one last time-even if it's your first time commenting. Please leave any thoughts you might have about the story just below._


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